Completing Racket’s Relicensing Effort (Now MIT or Apache)

posted by Sam Tobin-Hochstadt, with help from Sage Gerard and Joel Dueck and Matthew Flatt and the Software Freedom Conservancy, especially Pamela Chestek

With the upcoming Racket 7.5 release, almost all of Racket, including the core Racket CS binary, the standard library, and the packages provided with the main distribution, are available under a permissive license, either the Apache 2.0 License or the MIT License. You can read the details of the new license in the GitHub repository . This has been a long process, beginning in 2017, and we’re grateful to all the contributors to Racket, including those from very long ago, who gave permission for the re-licensing. More than 350 contributors to Racket responded; many of the responses can be seen in this GitHub issue .

Why relicense?

Racket has long been a part of the free software community, and we value both that community and the ability to build on other free software. However, two factors mean have made our previous license, the GNU LGPL, less of a good fit going forward. First, it is unclear how to apply the LGPL’s statement about dynamic linking to a language like Racket, where macro expansion can copy code from libraries to applications, and where applications are typically bundled with the Racket runtime and libraries. Second, some organizations unfortunately are unwilling to use software licensed under any variant of the GPL. Since we want to provide a clear license and to promote the use of Racket everywhere, a new, more-permissive license is the right choice for Racket