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Comment by _halgari | Hacker News Reader

From the license:

> You may not use REBL for commercial use.

Sometimes it seems as if Cognitect just doesn't want people to use Clojure. It's like they looked at the results from the survey[0], created a tool that appears to address some of the main gripes that people have, and then proceeded to say "screw you" to all of the people that use Clojure commercially and may actually pay for Datomic...

[0]: https://danielcompton.net/2018/03/28/clojure-survey-2018

I know how easy it is to come up with interpretations like that but the site guidelines ask you to push pause before simply posting them. They have a destructive effect, one that compounds nonlinearly.

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Haskell's motto is "avoid success at all costs", but it feels like it applies more to Clojure.

I genuinely believe that Clojure could have taken over the world if it had a more sensible open-source governance model.

Closed source I understand, they must have something in there they don't want to give away completely for free. But "no commercial use" just cuts out something like 90% of the user base. Because depending on your definition of those terms it would also apply to anyone building anything with it that they plan on selling in the future. Even paid tutorials on how to use it would be out of the question.

It's like "how to not get people to use your tool" 101

I was at the talk, and IIRC he said something about developing it while working with a client. It's quite likely it's a contract obligation.

I don't know what world releasing a tool that addresses some of the main gripes that people have is a "screw you", but it doesn't seem like a pleasant one to inhabit. The important bits are in Clojure 1.10.

I think the exciting thing is the datafy protocol, not necessarily this particular viewer. What he demoed seemed much more like a proof-of-concept. Like he said, he's excited to see what the Clojurescript community comes up with, and so am I. I might take a shot at building a browser in Emacs, though that takes away some more dynamic display opportunities.

An emacs based browser for this would be awesome!

My wild guess is that it will be added rather soon than later to CIDER. The protocols are part of Clojure, and Emacs is great with browsing buffers, so it doesn't seem very hard to implement.

That said I'm not Emacs expert so it may be harder than I imagine.

Everything except HTML and charts will be easy - after all, if something can be represented as or drawn with plain text, Emacs is probably the best tool for working with it. HTML has some half-decent previewers available, but those are essentially text browsers in elisp. Unfortunately, painting arbitrary images gets unwieldy with Emacs. You can get away with ASCII column charts, but forget scatter plots or sparklines. But for viewing that, I wouldn't mind an external application to put on another screen.

Honest question, how do we interpret "commercial use"?

I'd assume it means you cannot sell REBL itself or a derivative, not that you cannot use it as a developer tool to build your project, which kind of makes sense.

the REBL is just a javaFX program that builds upon `datafy` and `nav` connecting with the REPL. I think soon we will get other implementations (CLJS!).

I wouldn't want to read too much into this particular prototype of REBL. I think they don't want to have people re-package this iteration and sell it as-is.

Should it be read as "you may not resell it" or "you may not use it while being paid by someone"? It's a bit unclear.

Doesnt that just mean you cant depoloy REBL as part of a comercial product? Im sure it doesnt mean you can't use the tool at work. Not that I like seeing restrictions in any licences but REBL isnt the cool thing here, its datify and nav.

"Commercial use" is clearly any work-related use. (You are also not allowed to redistribute it at all)

I'd really like to hear that stated unambiguously by someone at Cognitect. It just can't be right. No sane person would think they could enforce such a rule and no sane person would be scared to "violate" it. There's no trace of information indicating what it was used for or when. If there is, no one should use it anyway.

Stated unambiguously by someone at Cognitect: https://github.com/cognitect-labs/REBL-distro/commit/144acd0...

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