We are super excited to announce that as of the very latest 3.0-alpha commit, WebSharper is now available under the Apache 2.0 license, free of charge to anyone, for both closed and open source applications!

Over the years, WebSharper grew from an experiment in F# web development into a mature, enterprise-grade F# web framework and helped a multitude of organizations benefit from its type-safe, functional constructs and its powerful F# to JavaScript translation engine. From early on in its development, our main focus was establishing sound abstractions around common web patterns and chores, from simple representations of client-side content, through type-safe, composable, declarative ways of specifying user interfaces, to representing even entire applications in the type system. Some of these abstractions are the result of years of hard work and research, and are distilled into peer-reviewed academic papers, a good set of online documentation and samples, and several book chapters, among others, and make WebSharper a truly innovative, robust, bleeding edge web framework for the serious enterprise web and mobile developer and also for the academically curious researcher.

It is this fundamental power, elegance of expression, and unparalleled productivity that in our humble opinion deserves more attention and widespread use, and this is a great motivation for us going Apache. We have grand and ambitious plans to take WebSharper to places we could never foresee before.

During the past few months and before, we received overwhelming community feedback confirming that there is an ever-growing need for going beyond ordinary web development and continuing to push the boundaries of robust functional web development with WebSharper. Community feedback also confirmed that we are now ready to take WebSharper to the next level and bring it to a much wider audience via a less restricted license.

What does this mean to existing users? First of all, existing license holders continue to be able to use the 2.X releases for closed source applications as before, and they are also welcome to update to the 3.0-alpha line at their convenience. We are now aiming to deliver a set of systematic API updates as part of the 3.X feature set, and many such changes will be breaking changes and new features. If, for whatever reason, you prefer to use the 2.X line, feel free to contact us for licensing. However, we recommend that new users start with the upcoming 3.X releases, despite possible API changes (flagged as pre-release or alpha for the time being, with our aim to deliver most of these changes by the end of this year).

At the same time of going Apache, we will also be offering dedicated support for WebSharper, a new level of service for enterprise users and groups. We will announce plans and related information on this blog shortly. Similarly, premium tooling built for enterprise ex-license holders will now be available on separate subscriptions, with existing license holders enjoying uninterrupted access.

Incidentally, today is also the birthday of one of our main WebSharper team members, Happy Birthday Loic! This is also a great time to say thanks to all those dozens of people who contributed to the development over the years – thanks everyone!

All in all, we can’t wait to hear how far WebSharper can take you in your web development efforts! These are exciting times for both F# +WebSharper and the entire community, and we hope you take this opportunity learn more about WebSharper and fall in love with it like we did.

And last - keep an eye on NuGet: the first set of 3.0-alpha binaries should arrive there tomorrow, and be sure to turn on the “Include pre-release” flag when updating.

Happy coding!