Today we’re relicensing the GraphQL specification under the Open Web Foundation Agreement (OWFa) v1.0. We think the OWFa is a great fit for GraphQL because it’s designed for collaborative open standards and supported by other well-known companies. The OWFa allows GraphQL to be implemented under a royalty-free basis, and allows other organizations to contribute to the project on reasonable terms.
Additionally, our reference implementation GraphQL.js and client-side framework Relay will be relicensed under the MIT license, following the React open source ecosystem’s recent change. The GraphQL specification and our open source software around GraphQL have different licenses because the open source projects’ license only covers the specific open source projects while the OWFa is meant to cover implementations of the GraphQL specification.
I want to thank everyone for their patience as we worked to arrive at this change. We hope that GraphQL adopting the Open Web Foundation Agreement, and GraphQL.js and Relay adopting the MIT license, will lead to more companies using and improving GraphQL, and pave the way for GraphQL to become a true standard across the web.
(Also published on code.facebook.com.)