Alexis, I appreciate the recent enthusiasm and efforts.
I helped build the current small Racket community (really starting when I moved to it exclusively, after developing portable open source for all the Schemes). My name is still up there with yours on "https://www.racket-lang.org/team.html". I recently proposed on racket-dev that a lot of additional people's contributions to building the Racket community should also be noted there (and I suppose that might wait for the Web site redesign work).
Lately, I haven't been able to justify investing more in writing new Scheme/Racket code that I can share, but I try to otherwise be helpful, to say things that I think should be said, and to preserve/further the investment I've already made in Racket. I oops in what I say frequently, but that seems to be unavoidable in practice, and racket-users doesn't pay me enough to hire an editor/spokesperson.
As for industry and open source dynamics, probably we both know things about this topic that the other doesn't. I'm sorry I can't get into extended discussion of this here, so I can only say I'd appreciate it if people consider my suggestions, in the context of their own experience and knowledge.
As for whether Racket is Free Software, I don't know, and it's low-priority distinction to me, but I suppose that the Software Freedom Conservancy might like it to be Free-as-in-FSF, and Racket did just choose to marry the Conservancy. BTW, I've spoken with RMS on multiple occasions about how Racket covered bases he laid out in his early GNU roadmaps (including something like `#lang`). Though recently Guile has seen new energy and movement towards its originally planned roles, and I'm happy to see that advance (and they can get another boost by borrowing a couple key features of Racket).
Amusingly enough, there's a connection to the current thread that might not be obvious: Guile (and, therefore, Scheme and Racket) was arguably sidelined years ago because GNU and various open source desktop energy consolidated behind Gnome (other than KDE), as it turned into a startup, by a couple very smart and very charismatic people, which startup then pushed the nascent MS C# and CLR for GNU desktop work, over Guile from the roadmap, which MS push many savvy industry people weren't buying, because fool-me-once, but then MS was able to point to an open source alternative, the development of which got funded, and which let MS suggest it therefore wasn't just an attempt to reestablish a ruthless monopoly stranglehold after the Web/Linux/Java/etc. disruption, and then, eventually, the startup united with MS, and then the co-founder was named head of the newly-acquired GitHub, which was a perfectly good call based on his understanding of open source and developer dynamics, and now we're back to where this thread started.
That's all public information that you might already know, and nothing necessarily wrong about it -- it's just an apropos example of the connectedness we often encounter, as we're understanding and reasoning about new situations in this business-y space, or trying to distill lessons and patterns from old ones.
I'd prefer to just build software systems, but software systems exist in a larger human system, affect it, and are affected by it. Hence, for example, why more people aren't using Scheme/Racket already, even when they want to, which is one reason why even we, in some narrow little niche, sometimes need to care about dynamics external to software.
None of us can know All The Things (I'll probably never know even 1% of what Matthias does about type theory, for one of many examples), but we try to combine what we know, and collaborate effectively, as we have time and interest.
I'm sorry I couldn't meet you and others at RacketCon this year, to help personalize more of these people who care about our shared community, but maybe next year.
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