Licensing

Hanki is licensed under the Zero-Clause BSD license (0BSD). The full text is in LICENSE.

One license covers everything: the compiler, the bytecode VM, the AOT runtime, the standard library, the tools, the documentation, the grammar, the examples, and the site. There are no exceptions.

The Hanki name is not part of the grant. The license covers the code and the prose; it does not grant permission to use the project's name to identify something else.

What this means for your programs

Nothing is asked of you.

An AOT binary statically links the Hanki runtime and the standard library, and a program run by the VM reaches that same standard library through its bindings. Under 0BSD this changes nothing: there is no notice to reproduce, no source to make available, and no Hanki-authored license notice to reproduce.

That is true of every way a program leaves your machine:

• publishing a compiled binary: a release page, a distro package, an app store, a public container image
• distributing .hk source that runs against the standard library
• delivering a binary to a client or another company
• running it as a service, or keeping it to yourself entirely

Your own files carry whatever license you choose, a proprietary one included.

Third-party code

That is true of Hanki's own code. A binary built by hanki build also links Rust dependencies under their own permissive licenses, and those ask for their notices to travel with them; deny.toml is the enforced list of which licenses may appear. Inside this tree, editor/tree-sitter-hanki/src/tree_sitter/parser.h bears tree-sitter's own MIT header.

Hanki release bundles and packages ship THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES beside the toolchain's license files. The release path generates it from the locked Cargo dependency graph and copies each package archive's own LICENSE, COPYING, NOTICE, COPYRIGHT, or UNLICENSE files verbatim; it is not a shared-text summary that would lose a crate's copyright line.

If you distribute a binary produced by hanki build, ship that THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES file with it. It includes the notices for the Hanki AOT runtime and its Rust dependencies. Dependencies added by your own native build or packaging remain yours to account for as well.

Contributions

Contributions submitted for inclusion in Hanki are accepted under 0BSD, the same license the project grants, without additional terms.