Read “contains a substantial portion of Julia” as “contains a substantial portion of the Julia language codebase,” i.e. the code for the Julia runtime and Base libraries.
I feel like this thread has gotten off the rails a bit, due to much confusion about mostly unrelated licensing questions. I’m not sure continuing this thread is particularly productive, since that would require scanning all 100+ comments to figure out exactly which statements were correct and which were misleading. If there’s concrete questions or concerns, a new thread scoped to those particular issues would probably be more productive.
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I was incorrect to imply that MIT has a copyleft effect. My thinking at the time had to do with Julia including source, rather than being compiled like most MIT projects that have had proprietary forks. But that doesn’t actually matter. You do have to include the MIT license file somewhere if you redistribute a substantial portion of the Julia source (whatever “substantial” means). But where I was wrong is here: you can still apply whatever license you want to any modifications you’ve made to the Julia source, including a proprietary or stricter open source license (e.g. GPL). And of course any additional code or data you ship with the Julia source can be under whatever license you like (or none at all, meaning all rights are reserved). So while there’s no legal force preventing Julia Computing from selling an improved proprietary fork of Julia, we are not going to do that.
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