from Hacker News

300 pounds needed for Shen to become BSD licensed

by barbudorojo on 12/30/14, 9:50 PM with 23 comments

The objective to convert Shen to BSD is very near, a pledge of 300 pounds is needed:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/qilang/fZZvPzCTVyA

  • by jnbiche on 12/30/14, 11:42 PM

    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.

  • by jordigh on 12/30/14, 10:51 PM

    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

    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.

  • by barbudorojo on 12/30/14, 10:48 PM

    There are versions of Shen in javascript, sbcl, ruby, java, python, scheme, clojure and haskell (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.

  • by gue5t on 12/30/14, 10:39 PM

    Why is money needed to achieve this licensing goal?

  • by listic on 12/30/14, 10:39 PM

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

  • by hga on 1/5/15, 3:59 PM

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

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

  • by briandear on 12/30/14, 10:47 PM

    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!

  • by doublec on 12/30/14, 10:55 PM

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

  • by sp332 on 12/30/14, 10:30 PM

    What is this?

  • by arto on 12/30/14, 10:36 PM