Modular has opened up the rest of MAX, its AI inference software. Phoronix reports the MAX graph compiler, MAX runtime and device extensibility hooks are now fully available as source, released with MAX 26.7. This follows Mojo being open-sourced in August after Qualcomm acquired Chris Lattner’s company.
Source available, not open source
Modular itself calls it “source available” because of the new MAX license.
- Allowed: building and distributing commercial products with MAX, with no fees or royalties.
- Not allowed: AI-assisted re-implementations of MAX, commercial hosted inference services built around MAX, and publishing or distributing modified source code.
- Modular’s reasoning: the distribution limits are meant to prevent fragmentation into incompatible versions of MAX, not to discourage individuals from experimenting. They say they want to make contributing improvements back as easy as possible.
MAX itself is a high-performance inference server with an OpenAI-compatible endpoint for LLMs.
My take
More inference code you can read is good news for local AI. Just don’t call it open source, because the license has real limits. If you’re building a product or a hosted service on top of it, read the license first. For tinkering and running your own models, it looks like a nice option to watch.
Have a blessed day! And Happy Hacking!
