Shen has a BSD License now | Hacker News Reader

Shen has a BSD License now

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5 pointshislaziness7 comments

Nope, it doesn't.

Or rather, it has a 3 clause BSD licence with an additional "Comment on BSD, GPL and Copyright": http://www.shenlanguage.org/license.pdf which is significantly longer than the 3 clauses minus the all caps disclaimer of warranty boilerplate.

Which might be acceptable, it looks OK at first glance (compared to an unacceptable initial version presented yesterday), but it does add to the overhead in doing things with Shen. Fatally? I don't know, but the usual dismissal that "It's got a weird licence" still holds, even if it has much less weight now.

Yes, it does Harold and this is not the first or probably the last time you have placed misinformation about the Shen project online. All the files have the same standard 3 clause BSD license.

But it is the very last time that I will have any public connection with you and whatever you have to say on this thread or in email will not be read by me.

Sayanora.

This topic has a discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8992340

(BTW, sayanora has a connotation that there's a possibility we'll meet again :-).

Every single file in the source distribution has BSD license attached. License.pdf clearly differentiate what is the licenses, and then tries to explain what that means, but that explanation does not put any restriction on the license, and you don't even have to read or agree with them in order to use it.

Unfortunately, a lot of us with some experience in IP law, albeit none of us lawyers, believe the additions to the master licence have meaning (else why are they there?), and do have a legal effect on the whole of Shen. See the other discussion I linked to for more, plus discussion on the Shen mailing list.

Maybe we're wrong, and you and Tarver are right, but as long as this is a debatable point most if not nearly all of the value of re-licencing has been negated.

> Maybe we're wrong, and you and Tarver are right, but as long as this is a debatable point most if not nearly all of the value of re-licencing has been negated.

I agree with your point. I think it's BSD, you think it's modified BSD. Who is right or not, it's up to lawyers to decide, and this is the exact reason why people wanted standard license for Shen, to avoid the confusion.

However, it's closer to standard license than previous, and I'll take the risk to use it for my personal projects, but I won't bother using it at work for anything, since I know my employer will not pay the lawyers to review it.

What's your opinion on using it for "serious" (i.e. things that might be used by others) open source projects? Say, using Shen as part of the toolbox of an operating system, as Barrelfish uses Haskell (http://www.barrelfish.org/ i.e. the Mackerel DSL to describe system details and the Hake build system).

This is not an idle question, BTW. I'd personally like to do something like Barrelfish and/or a "21st Century Lisp Machine" sort of system, having been part of the 20th Century Lisp Machine community in the early '80s. And my reaction to Haskell's syntax is akin to a lot of people's reactions to Lots of Irritating Sets of Parenthesis.

But Haskell has a very serious community, Shen doesn't, and I strongly suspect it never will.

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