AI infrastructure for everyone
We are, and will always be, developer first. Our license empowers everyone to build incredible AI.
FREE FOREVER
MAX is available FREE for everyone to self-manage.
What do I get with MAX?
SoTA inference performance for LLMs, PyTorch, and ONNX models
Run AI models and pipelines on any CPUs or GPUs
Deploy MAX yourself on-prem or on any cloud provider
Community support through Discord and Github
MAX & Mojo Community License
Get startedPAY AS YOU GO
Support the largest deployments needed by your enterprise.
What do I get with MAX Enterprise?
SLA support with guaranteed response time.
Dedicated Slack channel and account manager.
Access to the world’s best AI engineering team.
Prioritized feature requests and early access to our managed services AI platform.
Enterprise License
Contact SalesStill have questions about MAX licenses?
Frequently asked questions
General
What is MAX?
MAX is a free and permissive AI inference framework that enables developers and enterprises to develop and deploy AI inference workloads on any hardware type, into any type of environment (including into production). You can read more about MAX here.
What is Mojo?
Mojo is a new programming language that has the expressiveness of Python, with the performance of C. Mojo is a member of the Python family and powers critical parts of our infrastructure. Mojo is completely optional to use, as MAX supports Python, C++ and other languages natively. You can read more about Mojo here.
What is MAX Enterprise?
MAX Enterprise is a cloud platform we are developing for enterprises who seek managed services and enterprise support from us for AI infrastructure.
What kind of licenses are MAX and Mojo governed by?
MAX and Mojo are governed by a modified Business Source License which we call the MAX & Mojo Community License. We have adopted this license to ensure that we provide maximum flexibility to the world to utilize our infrastructure while balancing our ability to commercialize our infrastructure for the long term.
Modular open sources a lot of its technology, including the Mojo Standard Library, implementations of deep learning models like Llama 3 and more. This code is available on GitHub and it is licensed under Apache 2 with LLVM Exceptions, and includes contributions we receive from the community. These contributions are incorporated in MAX and Mojo and their usage and distribution (as part of MAX and Mojo) are covered by the broader MAX & Mojo Community License. We strongly believe in open-source software and are committed to continually opening our platform over time.
Why did you choose these licenses for MAX and Mojo?
For MAX and Mojo, we took the modified BSL approach because it allows enterprises, developers, and our rapidly expanding community to copy, modify and redistribute their applications under a wide range of conditions, including use in production. There are many other licenses like AGPL and SSPL that impose copyleft requirements and are problematic for many use cases. We believe our licensing approach strikes the right balance for both MAX and Mojo and only restricts use for a narrow range of use cases that are competitive with Modular’s business activities.
For our Github repositories and open sourced code, along with contributions from our community - we strongly believe in the Apache 2 with LLVM Exceptions, as it provides legal protection to users and contributors of the software. We outline more thoughts in this blog post.
What kinds of applications can I build under the MAX & Mojo Community License?
You are free to build, extend and develop anything on top of MAX and Mojo, including products and services that you want to monetize or that you can derive an income from (i.e. content on YouTube, Twitch, etc.), and you can put them in production. You can even build products that are competitive to Modular, as long as you aren't commercializing them. We have a specific provision defined for what we deem a "Competitive Activity" that captures what you can’t do in our License.
What is a Competitive Activity?
To ensure that we can drive a commercial model for our business, we define a Competitive Activity as building a commercial, publicly available product or service whose primary purpose is to provide AI infrastructure services to third parties, or associated paid support for this purpose.
Outside of this definition, you are free to build whatever you want with MAX and Mojo and integrate it into your products or services. For example, if you are building a startup whose primary purpose is AI code generation, or search, or health agents, you can use MAX and Mojo freely as part of your startup. Similarly, if you want to educate folks on YouTube on MAX and Mojo, you can do that freely relevant to our Trademark Policy. Conversely, if you want to build a startup whose primary purpose is to provide managed artificial intelligence services to third parties in a cloud hosted platform using MAX and Mojo for profit, its primary purpose overlaps our definition, and that would be deemed a Competitive Activity, which you cannot do without written permission.
We have done this to ensure existing organizations whose commercial models serve the primary purpose of providing AI infrastructure services can’t simply take our infrastructure and offer it themselves without our permission. We are building MAX Enterprise for this purpose, and as the creators, only we can provide the world's best enterprise and developer support accordingly. If you’d like to discuss licensing or commercialization of MAX and Mojo in a way that seems competitive, please contact our Sales Team – we’re very friendly.
What if Modular expands its products and services in the future?
If you want to build software that is not competitive today, but becomes competitive in the future, the License protects you – it will not be considered competitive. You will be free to continue to develop, iterate and extend your application.
How much do I have to pay to use MAX?
MAX is free to utilize and deploy in research and production environments on your own infrastructure, as long as your use case is not a Competitive Activity.
Can I host MAX myself for production?
Yes, you are free to use MAX to build any production applications you want, including deploying MAX yourself, as long as your use case is not a Competitive Activity.
Can I embed the MAX framework into software I distribute?
Yes, just make sure your application is not a Competitive Activity and follows the terms of the License.
Are there any scale limitations in the use of the MAX framework?
No limitations, you may scale MAX to any workload and size you need for supported hardware.
Will NVIDIA GPU support be licensed the same way?
Yes, we aim to release MAX support for NVIDIA GPUs in fall 2024 and that will use the same approach as the current CPU support.
Can I get enterprise support for the MAX?
Yes, that is available under our MAX Enterprise version of MAX. You can learn more on our Enterprise page, or contact our Sales Team.
Will MAX Enterprise offer managed cloud services?
Yes, we are building a managed AI cloud platform for MAX Enterprise with early design partners for AI infrastructure services. Please Contact Sales if you are interested in becoming an early partner.
How do I refer to the MAX & Mojo Community License in my OSS or private repository?
You are free to license your code with the relevant license you choose (i.e. MIT etc). For MAX and Mojo, please call back to our license directly from your repository’s README, similar to how we do this on MAX and Mojo Github Repositories (i.e. MAX and Mojo usage and distribution are licensed under the MAX & Mojo Community License.), or include a copy of our license directly.
What is the boundary between Mojo and MAX in terms of licensing?
MAX and Mojo today are licensed under the same License as indicated above. You are free to use them to build anything you want, including in production, as long as you aren’t building something that is a Competitive Activity. Mojo is a very horizontal programming language and we’d love to see it used to build many use-cases that are not currently solved with other programming languages.
Can I use Mojo in production environments?
You are free to build, extend and develop anything with Mojo as long as it's not a Competitive Activity within the scope of our License.
Why not package Mojo separately from MAX?
We are open to distributing Mojo without MAX in the future, but today MAX is deeply coupled to Mojo and distributing them together as a single package allows us to move faster. We are already having trouble keeping up with community activity, and are optimizing our ability to move fast and build the world’s best platform for heterogeneous compute. We also want to learn and evolve with our community, and learn how Mojo is being utilized with MAX.
Why will GPU support require MAX?
Accelerators require runtime components and orchestration logic that falls into the domain of MAX, not Mojo. The best way to use Mojo with GPUs and other accelerated computing is inside the MAX Framework. The Graph APIs and other extensibility APIs allow you to run Mojo code directly on GPUs and other hardware.
Will Mojo ever be fully open source?
Yes. We remain strong believers in the importance of open-source software to accelerating innovation and are deeply committed to progressively make source code of Mojo fully available over time.
What is the Apache 2 License with LLVM exceptions about?
Modular open sources a lot of its technology, including the Mojo Standard Library, implementations of deep learning models like Llama 3 and more. This code is available on GitHub and it is licensed under Apache 2 with LLVM Exceptions, and includes contributions we receive from the community.
We strongly believe in the Apache 2 with LLVM Exceptions, as it provides legal protection to users and contributors of the software, and we outline more thoughts in this blog post. All contributions are incorporated in MAX and Mojo and their usage and distribution (as part of MAX and Mojo) are covered by the broader MAX & Mojo Community License.