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Comment by jordigh | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

The current licensing doesn't has a name, the author states in the html page of the standard certain restrictions to fork the code, it has to pass some test, but those tests are not clearly defined and there are other restrictions that move people away from Shen. Choosing a BSD license solve the problem of giving a clear answer to the license of Shen and promotes cooperation.

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