Late last year we announced we’d retire Mu. The core maintainers have all moved onto other things, our lives have changed and the time we have available to maintain Mu has significantly decreased. Perhaps most of all, the world has moved on: when Mu started we were unique in the coding ecosystem. Now there are plenty of development environments focused on beginners.

We also promised we’d try to cut a final release.

Sadly, we’ve collectively decided we will not be able to do this.

Why?

Well, the cost of hosting websites (mostly the domain registration fees), the price of digital certificates for signing the installers, the annual fee to register for the privilege of participating on a platform (we’re looking at you Apple) and the time needed to investigate, refine and update code to work with the latest versions of other projects in the Python ecosystem are all inordinately expensive in terms of time and money. Were I (Nicholas) to pay all the financial burdens mentioned above, I estimate I’d have to pay around £1000. The cost in personal free time (that none of us have) for the development work is significant since this is deeply technical stuff we shoulder so you, the end user, don’t have to.

Yes, Mu is free software. No, Mu is not free software.

Let’s just say it’s complicated, shall we..? ;-)

Therefore the core maintainers have come to the decision to gently step away from Mu with immediate effect.

What happens next?

  • Mu and its associated projects / websites will be put into archive mode at the start of September. This means the source code will always be available on Github.
  • As the domains associated with Mu expire the websites will go offline over the next year. However, the content of the websites will always be available via archive.org.
  • I (Nicholas) will write a personal blog post reflecting on this journey: the good, the bad and (sadly) the ugly. This will appear on my blog before the end of the year.

That’s it!

Wishing you all feelings of fulfilment as you flourish through your journey in code. We, the Mu core developers, sincerely hope you use your technical skills for fun things that enlarge our world in a humane, compassionate and thoughtful way.

Peace,

Carlos, Tiago, Tim, Vasco and Nicholas.

(The Mu core developers.)