First of all, thank you for changing the license to BSD. This is a really happy news.
Reading all the discussions including Google Group, HN, and Reddit so far, to deal with the concerns of hga and others, is it possible to just move the comment part of the licence.pdf to porting.htm?
Perhaps the main motivation of the changes to BSD was to encourage shenturions and potential shenturions to use Shen at work, and we are almost there. If you do that, then nobody will claim the licence, and we can move forward. We don't want to see anymore hatred just because of the licence issue. We want to focus on developing real applications using Shen at work and see the Land of Shen to expand. Please consider if you think this is reasonable. Thanks
Or rather, it now 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
less weight now.
The license text as found in the Shen and KLambda sources lacks the "Comment on..." section, i.e. it's boilerplate 3-clause BSD.
Apparently, Dr. Tarver intends the license.pdf file to serve as a "licensing guide" for would-be port authors, while not intending to add terms or conditions to the BSD license by way of the Comments section. I think that intention could be made a bit more explicit, but I'm satisfied that the license as given in the sources is plain vanilla 3-clause BSD.
Perhaps a better solution would be to have a license.pdf file which contains only the BSD text and a separate PDF file which gives commentary on the license. Someone mentioned that possibility on the mailing list yesterday; if there's enough hubbub about it, perhaps Dr. Tarver will implement the suggestion.
I am doubtful that a BSD license excludes the possibility of a port author licensing the port author's own original code under a GPL license, though that seems to me to be Dr. Tarver's conclusion. At most, I think Dr. Tarver could choose to withhold certification from and refuse to list on the download page any port that includes GPL'd code.
Again Harold, a falsehood. Since you have contributed to two threads with the same misinformation, I'll make this clear, not for you, but for everybody else.
Shen is under BSD and anybody who downloads it can see this. The 1/3 page of comment in the pdf is simply pointing out copyright law, mainly for platform holders (and you're not one having sent no code). Everything was thrashed out in fine detail and agreed on before the change.
For other hackers, none of this will register with Harold who will simply continue to spout as he likes to do and write emails to me, but everybody else can find out for themselves by downloading.
I'm not going to feed your self-importance by entering into public correspondence with you. This is all I'm going to write. If others want to get down with you, they can.
[+] [-] doall|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hga|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hga|11 years ago|reply
Or rather, it now 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 less weight now.
[+] [-] michaelsbradley|11 years ago|reply
Apparently, Dr. Tarver intends the license.pdf file to serve as a "licensing guide" for would-be port authors, while not intending to add terms or conditions to the BSD license by way of the Comments section. I think that intention could be made a bit more explicit, but I'm satisfied that the license as given in the sources is plain vanilla 3-clause BSD.
Perhaps a better solution would be to have a license.pdf file which contains only the BSD text and a separate PDF file which gives commentary on the license. Someone mentioned that possibility on the mailing list yesterday; if there's enough hubbub about it, perhaps Dr. Tarver will implement the suggestion.
I am doubtful that a BSD license excludes the possibility of a port author licensing the port author's own original code under a GPL license, though that seems to me to be Dr. Tarver's conclusion. At most, I think Dr. Tarver could choose to withhold certification from and refuse to list on the download page any port that includes GPL'd code.
[+] [-] MTarver|11 years ago|reply
Shen is under BSD and anybody who downloads it can see this. The 1/3 page of comment in the pdf is simply pointing out copyright law, mainly for platform holders (and you're not one having sent no code). Everything was thrashed out in fine detail and agreed on before the change.
For other hackers, none of this will register with Harold who will simply continue to spout as he likes to do and write emails to me, but everybody else can find out for themselves by downloading.
I'm not going to feed your self-importance by entering into public correspondence with you. This is all I'm going to write. If others want to get down with you, they can.
[+] [-] kybernetikos|11 years ago|reply