

300 pounds needed for Shen to become BSD licensed - barbudorojo
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/qilang/fZZvPzCTVyA
The objective to convert Shen to BSD is very near, a pledge of 300 pounds is needed:<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;groups.google.com&#x2F;forum&#x2F;#!topic&#x2F;qilang&#x2F;fZZvPzCTVyA
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jnbiche
I've been extremely impressed by Shen, but have been holding off because of
the license.

I'll chip in a little and hope this pulls it toward BSD, at which point I'm
willing to start investing in the infrastructure.

~~~
barbudorojo
Thanks, now I feel I have done something useful posting here. (I have never
bought any CS book or chip in any money to any project).

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jordigh
Oh, wow, functional programming without the oddities of Haskell syntax! I'm
definitely intrigued.

What's the current licensing situation? I would prefer a copyleft license, but
if it already had a free license, I don't really care if it's similar to a BSD
license or not.

Edit: Ah, found it:

[http://www.shenlanguage.org/license.html](http://www.shenlanguage.org/license.html)

Wow, this looks awful. It's a vanity license with language that is very
unfamiliar to me. Can a license declare something to be legal or not, isn't
that for judges to decide, not licenses? It has a bunch of weird clauses that
I don't want to try to understand, and Wikipedia claims this is GPL-
incompatible and non-free software.

Yuck.

Yeah, ok, I'm kinda interested in a free license now.

~~~
hga
The current license is a totally impossible custom one. It tries to say the
same things at least 3 times each, resulting in an uninterpretable mess, with
ambiguities decided by the author, and after his death a committee. E.g. he's
stated that you cannot make public an unfinished implementation. There's also
the minor detail that his promises pertaining to money are worthless if they
prove to be inconvenient.

The concept of the license is OK, the author wants a "Write Once, Run
Anywhere" landscape where you can't break the spec and therefore other
people's code, but the implementation is bad enough a lot of people including
myself gave up on investing in the language and ecosystem.

~~~
barbudorojo
The author was looking for help to develop a minimal battery of tests that any
new implementation should have to pass, but there were no voluntaries. Anyway,
I think that becoming BSD can help to gather more souls.

~~~
hga
Before I checked out of the project he was talking about a test suite, but was
firm on not changing the license.

If it goes through, it would indeed make a drastic change, although it could
take a long time before the brand damage is repaired.

------
barbudorojo
There are versions of Shen in javascript, sbcl, ruby, java, python, scheme,
clojure and haskell
([http://www.shenlanguage.org/download_form.html](http://www.shenlanguage.org/download_form.html))

The basic idea is to construct a kernel with 40 functions in such a way that
the language is easily portable. With those 40 functions Shen is like a
mixture of Lisp, prolog and typep racket.

I should like to see a version of Shen in Nim.

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gue5t
Why is money needed to achieve this licensing goal?

~~~
takeda
I just looked at older conversations on the mailing list, I think this
provides a bit of explanation:

[https://groups.google.com/d/msg/qilang/HBBjtIxegFY/Wmv3Lh1IR...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/qilang/HBBjtIxegFY/Wmv3Lh1IRwsJ)

~~~
jgh
Why does he need a lawyer to do a BSD license?

~~~
hga
He used an estimate of what it would take to have a lawyer draft a new licence
to price simply changing it to BSD.

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listic
They have a committee with the chairman, vice-chairman and deputy vice-
chairman; but does anyone actually use this language?

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hga
The BSD total has been achieved:
[https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!topic/qilang/e4-PcL2...](https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!topic/qilang/e4-PcL2K2WQ)

tl;dr: in a couple of weeks version 17 will be released with the usual bug
fixes etc. and BSD licensed.

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briandear
Why does it cost money to get BSD licensed? I am not sure -- who actually gets
the money from this drive? For fundraising, there certainly isn't a lot of
information. I am very ignorant about this particular domain, so please excuse
me!

~~~
barbudorojo
I just copied a post from the Shen group: I've now begun collecting on the
pledges. £2583.52 was pledged, but I'll honour my side as soon as I've
collected £2500, which should be reached if people keep to their pledges. You
can follow the progress on
[http://www.shenlanguage.org/total.htm](http://www.shenlanguage.org/total.htm).

All the money is being used to systematically upgrade stlib; instituting a
series of monographs in computer science documenting the library. The first is
in graph theory.

Mark

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doublec
For those wondering about Shen, this Strange Loop talk gives a taste of it
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMcRBdSdO_U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMcRBdSdO_U)

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sp332
What is this?

~~~
arto
[http://www.shenlanguage.org/](http://www.shenlanguage.org/)

> Shen is a portable functional programming language that offers pattern
> matching, lambda calculus consistency, macros, optional lazy evaluation,
> static type checking, an integrated fully functional Prolog, and an inbuilt
> compiler-compiler.

> Shen has one of the most powerful type systems within functional
> programming. Shen runs under a reduced instruction Lisp and is designed for
> portability. The word ‘Shen’ is Chinese for 'spirit' and our motto reflects
> our desire to liberate our work to live under many platforms.

------
arto
[http://www.shenlanguage.org/shenbsd.htm](http://www.shenlanguage.org/shenbsd.htm)

