The objective to convert Shen to BSD is very near, a pledge of 300 pounds is needed:<p>https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/qilang/fZZvPzCTVyA
I've been extremely impressed by Shen, but have been holding off because of the license.<p>I'll chip in a little and hope this pulls it toward BSD, at which point I'm willing to start investing in the infrastructure.
Oh, wow, functional programming without the oddities of Haskell syntax! I'm definitely intrigued.<p>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.<p>Edit: Ah, found it:<p><a href="http://www.shenlanguage.org/license.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.shenlanguage.org/license.html</a><p>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.<p>Yuck.<p>Yeah, ok, I'm kinda interested in a free license now.
There are versions of Shen in javascript, sbcl, ruby, java, python, scheme, clojure and haskell (<a href="http://www.shenlanguage.org/download_form.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.shenlanguage.org/download_form.html</a>)<p>The basic idea is to construct a kernel with 40 functions in such a way that the language is easily portable. With those 40 functions Shen is like a mixture of Lisp, prolog and typep racket.<p>I should like to see a version of Shen in Nim.
The BSD total has been achieved: <a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!topic/qilang/e4-PcL2K2WQ" rel="nofollow">https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!topic/qilang/e4-PcL2...</a><p>tl;dr: in a couple of weeks version 17 will be released with the usual bug fixes etc. and BSD licensed.
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!
For those wondering about Shen, this Strange Loop talk gives a taste of it <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMcRBdSdO_U" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMcRBdSdO_U</a>