Meta moves PyTorch to the new PyTorch Foundation

Background

By 2022 PyTorch was widely used. Meta, which had driven its development, decided to move the project to an independent foundation.^[1][2]

What happened

On 12 September 2022 Meta announced that PyTorch would move to the Linux Foundation as a top-level project called the PyTorch Foundation.^[1][2] The founding governing board had members from AMD, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Meta, Microsoft Azure and NVIDIA.^[2]

Key details

The new structure separated the two kinds of decision. Business decisions moved to the foundation board, while technical decisions stayed with individual maintainers under a newly codified hierarchical governance.^[2]

Soumith Chintala wrote that PyTorch had over 2,400 contributors and nearly 154,000 projects built on it, and that Meta remained its largest contributor.^[2]

Mark Zuckerberg said more than 150,000 projects on GitHub were built on the framework.^[1]

PyTorch remained licensed under BSD-3-Clause.^[1]

A Linux Foundation project is hosted by a non-profit that supports open-source software. Joining it lets a project set up its own governing board, which in this case included cloud providers and chip makers.^[2] The licence stayed the same. BSD-3-Clause is a permissive open-source licence that allows software to be used, modified and redistributed, provided the copyright notice is kept.^[1]

Meta's announcement set out how the project would be run from then on. PyTorch was no longer the project of a single company, and its board members were companies that build cloud services and hardware, the environments in which many PyTorch models are run.^[2]

The foundation model also shows how a project can change its governance while keeping its licence. PyTorch remained under the same BSD-3-Clause licence after the move.^[1]

Impact

The move split decision-making. Business decisions went to a board that included several large cloud and chip companies, so the framework was no longer governed by Meta alone.^[2]