Mario Zechner is joining us at Earendil and we just acquired Pi. An Open Source project. Earendil is a venture-backed for-profit, public benefit corporation. How do those things go together?

Who Are We Serving?

There is much about Pi and Mario that we admire. As the new home for Pi, Earendil has big shoes to fill. One of the aspects which is most important to us is to be clear about who we are serving, and to ensure that Pi continues to serve its core users. All users of Pi are our customers, but not all customers are going to pay for Pi. The users that don’t pay for Pi, but use it to create their own products, or who work hard to extend it, or who use it as a coding agent, are just as much our customers as paying customers. We want to do right by all of the groups above.

Win-Win Transactions

There are aspects of Pi which we intend to build on for Earendil to provide commercial offerings. We do not yet know what those are, but we want to be transparent and upfront about our desire to do so. We will walk this path carefully.

We want Pi to be, like all other projects we work on at Earendil, something that delivers value to you. We desire to create products that people want in their life and to align our business models with the value we deliver to customers. Simply said: we seek win-win situations: we aspire that both we and our customers are better off as a result of that transaction. That’s the guiding principle.

Applying this principle to Open Source can create tensions and challenges. Many have said that Open Source and money have a tendency to not mix well with one another. We believe it is not at all impossible but it requires careful consideration and transparency.

The Birth of Open Source Companies

An Open Source company in many ways can be seen as an oxymoron. At the heart of the business there is this tension that seems hard to resolve. Yet if we take a step back, that tension comes from the heart of what Open Source stands for. How can it be that a profit seeking vehicle is willingly giving up control? This question requires resolution in a satisfactory manner that does not result in lofty statements that are withering under the slightest bit of pressure. The first one comes from playing the long game. We understand what makes Open Source work and what doesn’t. We have been exposed to companies walking back on their Open Source promises before and many of them came because companies were not able to create sustainable business models that align with their community.

We have also learned from our own past here and are guided by those learnings, which allows us to be more transparent with our community in terms of how we intend to tackle this.

For us the answer comes from transparency, a clear delineation about licenses ahead of time and irrevocable promises that allow people to do long term planning around our Open Source projects.

The Death of Open Source Companies

It’s not common for companies to consider their downside case, but when it comes to Open Source projects that is a very important aspect of it. True Open Source projects are a common good. They are shaped to allow those projects to go down paths that span beyond the vision and structure of their stewards. The beauty of Open Source is that it means a true steward of a project is giving up certain control: users can fork it at any day. In a well run Open Source project this tension also creates greater alignment between users and stewards. It holds us accountable for delivering value that is aligned with our users.

We already discussed that there is a history of stewards walking back on their promises. The question of what happens when a company falters or gets acquired is always in a user’s head when they use a commercially run Open Source project. And it should be! That is an important consideration and one we want to also transparently talk about for the future of Pi.

The Pi Licensing Strategy

Pi is an excellent piece of technology. We chose to build on it because of the craft that went into it. In the land overgrown with AI slop, Pi shines as a well engineered piece of technology. Earendil’s products are not just built on top of Pi, the agent library, they are also built with Pi, the coding agent and we equally want to retain that. So Pi remains MIT licensed and that will not change.

There will however be parts of Pi or related to Pi in the future that are not Open Source licensed, but Fair Source licensed or outright proprietary and we want to give you ideas of how we are thinking about it and why.

Here is how we transparently think about licensing at Earendil:

• The core is MIT: there is no discussion. You are free to build on it, to use it, to fork it. It’s a true Open Source license and we have no desire to change any of that. This is something we commit ourselves to.
• Certain value added features will be Fair Source: we intend on building some commercial products in the future that connect to Pi which are Fair Source. They will convert to Open Source at a later date as downside risk protection for our users, but they will be part of our commercial offering.
• There will be closed source additions: There are some features which are always paid only and just be proprietary licensed, or just be cloud infrastructure without any source publicly available.
• Trademarks: our main mechanism of protection is trademark enforcement. When you see pi, it’s a product of Earendil, with Mario, the creator of Pi, at the helm. This is a strategy that has been employed in the past for many Open Source projects from Mozilla, to Linux and others.

The guiding principle is that we want to make Pi as universally useful as possible, and that is reflected in our commitment to licensing it under the MIT license. Simultaneously, we have an explicit desire to build commercial products at Earendil that blend into our Open Source software. Some of those will thus become Fair Source and undergo Delayed Open Source Publication (DOSP) and some functionality will just never be available under an Open Source license to begin with, such as server side services.

Pi and Earendil

This goes to the heart of what we at Earendil see in Pi. The last year of building software in the agentic space has been both exciting and frightening. We see a real shift in both how software is developed, but also how humans and machines interact with one another. The way that Mario has built Pi: with craft, with patience, and a view towards how AI can strengthen human agency, is quite frankly inspiring.

At the beginning of this post we asked how an Open Source project and for profit Company might go together. Part of the answer is that we are not trying to build just another for profit Company. At its heart, Earendil is committed to crafting software and open protocols. We believe in openness and transparency. This post is an attempt to be an example of that and we hope it helps answer any questions you may have. We’re excited for the path ahead together.