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300 pounds needed for Shen to become BSD licensed

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Re: 300 pounds needed for Shen to become BSD licensed

#11

Post by barbudorojo »

briandear wrote: post #8

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!

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.

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

Re: 300 pounds needed for Shen to become BSD licensed

#12

Post by 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

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.

Re: 300 pounds needed for Shen to become BSD licensed

#14

Post by barbudorojo »

jordigh wrote: post #12

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 m…

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.

Re: 300 pounds needed for Shen to become BSD licensed

#15

Post by takeda »

briandear wrote: post #8

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!

Here's a bit of context: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/qilang/HBBjtIxegFY/Wmv3Lh1IR...

Re: 300 pounds needed for Shen to become BSD licensed

#16

Post by hga »

jordigh wrote: post #12

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 m…

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.

Re: 300 pounds needed for Shen to become BSD licensed

#17

Post by barbudorojo »

hga wrote: post #16
jordigh wrote: post #12

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 m…

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 con…

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.

Re: 300 pounds needed for Shen to become BSD licensed

#18

Post by hga »

barbudorojo wrote: post #17
hga wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 con…

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.

Re: 300 pounds needed for Shen to become BSD licensed

#19

Post by jgh »

takeda wrote: post #10
gue5t wrote: post #6

Why is money needed to achieve this licensing goal?

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...

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