

Shen: The future direction - shaunxcode
http://www.shenlanguage.org/babel/babel.htm

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Phlogistique
> we have a liberal and sound license

No you don't.

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andrewcooke
can you expand? it - <http://www.shenlanguage.org/license.html> \- seems to be
intended to let anyone use the language while keeping the language itself
under the control off the authors. is that correct? if so, what's the problem?

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pranjalv123
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the recent Oracle v. Google lawsuit
determine that language specifications aren't copyrightable?

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tikhonj
The _specification_ itself is copyrightable, but the language it specifies
isn't necessarily copyrightable.

I do not know the exact particulars of the Oracle v Google case, but my
impression was that the judge ruled that _APIs_ could not be copyrighted,
which does not necessarily reflect anything about the language itself. Even
more tentatively, I do not think a programming language could be copyrighted,
but I would want somebody else to answer that more authoritatively.

Either way, this license is actually about the _implementation_ of Shen. So if
you want to write your own compiler from scratch for the same language, you're
free to do so. In fact, this is actually mentioned in the FAQ at the end of
the license page. That said, beyond copyright, they also control the name
"Shen". So you'd be free to implement a language that was mostly, but not
completely, a clone of Shen, you would be free to (assuming you do not reuse
any of their code), but could not actually call it "Shen".

Anyhow, my knowledge of the law is laughably incomplete and I am clearly not a
lawyer, so take everything I've said with a grain of salt.

