Modular opens MAX source code under a new license with no royalties

What Modular has released

Modular says developers can now explore, modify and extend the entire MAX stack. The release covers the remaining core components behind MAX's heterogeneous capabilities: the graph compiler, the runtime and the hardware backends, which include support for CPUs and GPUs.

The step completes a gradual opening of the stack. According to Modular, it began with the Mojo standard library in 2024, followed by MAX's kernels, models, serving infrastructure and APIs throughout 2025. In August of this year, the company fully open sourced the Mojo compiler and toolchain.

Modular also says MAX is now open to community contributions. For now it will accept bug fixes, with plans to expand to refactors and other changes over time, the same gradual approach it took with the Mojo standard library and compiler.

How the MAX License works

Many MAX components stay under Apache 2.0, including the MAX kernel library in Mojo, Mojo interfaces for programming accelerators, Python APIs for the serving CLI and modeling, and MAX models. The new MAX License applies to the internals released now and to the MAX binaries Modular distributes. Each source file carries a header naming its license.

The license allows:

• Unlimited use on any hardware without licensing fees.
• Forking MAX for the purpose of contributing back to the main project.
• Building libraries and applications on top of MAX and licensing them however you choose.

There are three limitations. You cannot use any part of MAX as input to an AI system to produce a reimplementation of MAX. Companies that sell hosted inference or training services built on MAX must prominently display the "Modular Accelerated" wordmark. And modified MAX source code cannot be published or distributed, except through a fork meant for contributing changes back.

Modular argues these rules target fragmentation, not individual experimentation. The company says MAX's core goal is to unify the programming model across hardware, which becomes much harder if every platform develops its own incompatible version. It points to LLVM as the kind of shared codebase it hopes to replicate. MAX may also collect usage telemetry, and the software is provided as-is, without warranties.

Alliance program and what comes next

Modular says it is entering a new chapter within Qualcomm and wants to accelerate its mission to democratize heterogeneous compute. At ModCon, it announced the Modular alliance program, which is meant to bring together hardware vendors, model labs and data center operators around a common software foundation.

Partners that contribute engineering resources, compute or early model checkpoints would get a voice in governance and conformance standards, input into the roadmap, priority for upstream contributions, early access to model checkpoints, ownership of dedicated hardware backends and more permissive licensing. Modular plans to share more in the coming months, and interested parties can write to [email protected].

What it means for developers

For developers, researchers and hardware vendors, the main change is access: the full MAX codebase can be read and built from source, and it can be used commercially without fees or royalties. The restrictions on redistributing modified code and on AI-assisted reimplementation set clear limits on forking, and companies selling hosted inference must display the Modular wordmark.

Modular says the license will keep evolving as the technology matures and it hears from the community. Cofounders Chris Lattner and Tim Davis will hold a live Q&A on the license on November 10 at 10 AM PT. MAX can be installed with pip install max[all], and the source is on GitHub.