Public Alpha Release

A Personal Note

After five years of hard work, I'm proud to release the first alpha of ZubanLS. My journey began in 2012 with the creation of Jedi—a Python auto-completion library that would go on to reach millions of users and billions of downloads.

If you’re encountering issues, I’d love to hear about them. I’m especially interested in real-world cases, and I encourage you to reach out to us.

I’m deeply grateful to everyone who has supported this journey and thankful for the opportunity to focus on solving problems that have challenged me for over a decade. Many of the hard problems are now behind us—though some, like the long tail of false positives, still remain.

Why not Open Source?

Some of you may wonder why ZubanLS isn’t open source, unlike Jedi. The honest answer is that open source never worked out for me financially. Beyond some small donations and a small recurring compensation from Tidelift, I was never able to make a living from it. I'm no longer a student, and with a family to support, it became clear I needed a sustainable path.

Joining a company like Astral (makers of Ruff) could have been an option—but I’ve also grown skeptical of venture capital as a model. VC-backed companies often need to aim for massive success or risk disappearing within a decade. I want to build something that lasts. I’ve already spent more than ten years in this space, and I plan to continue.

That said, I remain committed to making ZubanLS free for students, non-commercial organizations, and small companies. But I also believe it’s fair for larger companies—especially those relying on the speed and reliability ZubanLS offers—to contribute. That’s why I’ve chosen a freemium model: free for smaller codebases (under 50,000 lines, not counting dependencies), paid for larger ones.

If you're working with large codebases and struggling with Mypy’s performance, I’d love to collaborate and help you solve those issues.

Happy coding,

~ Dave