Photo by Nick Scheerbart on Unsplash

This decision has been coming for a while.

In summary: We (the core development team) have decided together to retire Mu. This blog post explains what happens next, what you can expect from us, and what the end result should look like. As always, we invite constructive feedback, ideas and critique.

In more detail: When Mu was first created, there was a need for something Mu-ish and we were able to quickly build what teachers, beginners and those who support them asked for. Almost ten years later, there are lots of well funded and supported tools that fulfil the reason Mu was created. Furthermore, we (the core team) are volunteers and our lives have moved onto new jobs, new interests and new communities. However, we all feel very fond of Mu, and proud of what we have achieved, so we want to honour the community that has coalesced around Mu and ensure the retirement is smooth, predictable and doesn’t leave folks surprised or uncertain.

Currently, here’s what’s going to happen:

  1. Sometime in the new year we will release a new version of Mu, based on the current state of the master branch with a few bug fixes. This will be a “legacy” release of Mu in that we deliberately pin our versions of libraries to older versions so the many folks using Mu on equipment that is old and/or out-of-date can still continue to use it. (Aside: many educational institutions and other places that use Mu have limited budgets and use computing equipment that is not able, for whatever reason, to use the latest and greatest version of the libraries upon which we depend.)
  2. Soon after, we will release the final version of Mu. To the best of our ability and availability of effort, this will be updated to use the latest versions of all the libraries upon which we depend. This is to ensure the final release of Mu is usable for perhaps a few more years before starting to look out of date.
  3. After this final release we will put all the repositories in the Mu organisation on GitHub into an archived and read-only mode.
  4. The Mu related websites (codewith.mu and madewith.mu) will be updated to point to the latest releases, and reflect the retired status of Mu. After one year, these domain names will not be renewed.
  5. Before releasing Mu in steps 1 and 2, we will ensure that any links used by Mu point to the site as archived by the Wayback Machine at archive.org - thus ensuring things like help will continue to work into the future.
  6. At each point in the process described above, we will publish a post on this blog so folks can follow our progress.
  7. Finally, I (Nicholas) in collaboration with the other core developers (Carlos, Tiago, Tim and Vasco), will write a retrospective blog post on my personal blog to reflect on the journey that we’ve been on with Mu: the good, the bad and the ugly (it has been quite a ride, and we want to end on a high note!).

We expect this process to be finished the the end of the first quarter of 2025.

As is always the case with Mu, we welcome constructive feedback, ideas and critique. Should we receieve feedback we’ll try to address and, when appropriate, integrate such feedback. Feedback should be made via our discussions page on GitHub.

Nicholas, Carlos, Tiago, Tim and Vasco.