Genuinely curious; while I understand why we would want a language to be open-source (there's plenty of good reasons), do you have anecdotes where the open-sourceness helped you solve a problem?

Not the OP, but I have needed to patch Qt due to bugs that couldn't be easily worked around.

I have also been frustrated while trying to interoperate with expensive proprietary software because documentation was lacking, and the source code was unavailable.

In one instance, a proprietary software had the source code "exposed", which helped me work around its bugs and use it properly (also poorly documented).

There are of course other advantages of having that transparancy, like being able to independently audit the code for vulnerabilities or unacceptable "features", and fix those.

Open source is oftentimes a prerequisite for us to be able to control our software.

It has helped prevent problems. I am not worried about a python suddenly adding a clause stating that I can’t release a ML framework…

In the earlier days of rustc, it was handy to be able to look at the context for a specific compiler error (this is before the error reporting it is now known for). Using that, I was able to diagnose what was wrong with my code and adjust it accordingly.

More of a question of /will/ Mojo eventually be entirely open source, chunks of it already are. The intent from Modular is eventually it will be, just not everything all at once and not whilst they're internally doing loads of dev for their own commercial entity. Which seems fair enough to me. Importantly they have open sourced lots of the stdlib which is probably what anyone external would contribute to or want to change anyway? https://www.modular.com/blog/the-next-big-step-in-mojo-open-...

When it has become open source I will consider building up expertise and a product on it. Until it has happened there are no guarantees that it will.

Well the "expertise" is mostly just Python thats sort of the value prop. But yeah building an actual AI product ontop I'd be more worried about the early stage nature of Modular rather than the implementation is closed source.

Sure, that’s the value prop of numba too. But reality is different.

Building on vapor carries a lot of risk. For all anyone knows they take a page from Mathworks and it winds up costing $20k+/year/license if you aren't an academic.