Marimo blog post

content/blog/2025/marimo-acquisition-multi-stakeholder-governance/index.md

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+---
+title: "Marimo's acquisition highlights the value of multi-stakeholder governance"
+date: "2025-10-31"
+authors:
+  - Chris Holdgraf
+categories:
+  - organization
+tags:
+  - open-source
+  - community
+  - leadership
+  - jupyter
+---
+
+[Marimo announced they've been acquired by CoreWeave](https://marimo.io/blog/joining-coreweave) this week. Congratulations to the Marimo team for their hard work paying off! Marimo is an impressive product with excellent functionality, and we're excited to see what they build next.
+
+This acquisition also highlights something important: **the value of multi-stakeholder governance in open source**.
+
+## Why governance matters
+
+For years, people have talked about Marimo "replacing" [Jupyter](../../../collaborators/jupyter/). At a product level, Marimo has indeed built an excellent tool and platform. For example, they've really moved the needle on reactive notebook workflows (and we're excited about community projects like [ipyflow](https://github.com/ipyflow/ipyflow) that build on ideas [originally explored by the Cal Poly Jupyter team 7 years ago](https://github.com/jupytercalpoly/reactivepy)).
+
+But **Marimo cannot replace Jupyter without replacing its core differentiating value**: Jupyter is [governed and led by a community of peers](https://jupyter.org/governance), not a single company (see [the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI)](https://openscholarlyinfrastructure.org/) for one explanation of what this looks like and why it's important for the scientific and scholarly ecosystem). It even recently set up the [Jupyter Foundation](https://jupyterfoundation.org) to facilitate participation and co-funding from larger companies and encourage them to pool resources.
+
+This acquisition demonstrates why that matters. Marimo's product roadmap is now driven by CoreWeave's business strategy. That might be great for users, or it might not. Either way, it highlights how single-company ownership shapes the direction of tools that communities depend on (this is exacerbated by the fact that Marimo requires contributors to [sign a CLA](https://marimo.io/cla) giving up the rights to their contributions, and allowing the company to change the license if they wish).
+
+## Jupyter will never be acquired
+
+That's a feature, not a bug.
+
+Multi-stakeholder governance means Jupyter's future is decided by its community, not by any single company's acquisition or business pivot.
+
+This is why Jupyter is a core part of 2i2c's own mission and product strategy: we want to co-create a healthy open source ecosystem of peers. We've built our own organization around similar principles:
+
+- **[Open practices and transparency](../../../open-practices/)**: Our strategy, operations, and decision-making processes are all done in public, with an upstream-first approach to development.
+- **[Right to Replicate](../../../right-to-replicate/)**: Communities can take their infrastructure and run it themselves if we're not serving their needs
+- **[Commitment to open technology](../../../open-technology/)**: We build on and contribute to openly-governed projects like Jupyter
+- **[Foundational contributions](../foundational-contributions/)**: We dedicate team capacity to upstream governance, maintenance, and community building
+
+Open, multi-stakeholder governance is a core part of the open source ecosystem we all rely on. Communities that follow this model need support from their network of contributors. That's why 2i2c will continue supporting communities like Jupyter that embody these values.