I think they're just playing a larger distribution game to get people locked into
Mojo then eventually pay for their Modular engine hosting services, just about the same as most open core, VC backed startups.
I see what you're saying, but it's pretty different from an open core analytics product or something. This is a language/dev environment and the bar is a lot higher because 1) I know it's going to be a big investment to learn the language and ecosystem 2) I'm deeply locked-in technically by writing my stuff in this language 3) the competitors are open source and at this point I'm not worried about python, numpy, typescript etc going away. My feedback is basically that despite this project looking cool, I will not be writing any Mojo until it's open source.