Comment by 616c

11 years ago

Also interesting and worthy of note is that this project transitioned to BSD recently, and they are doing it as part of a donation drive.

http://www.shenlanguage.org/shenbsd.htm

I am an amateur Lisper, and like others I whined (perhaps irrationally) that their custom non-OSI only one implementation of the language or else license was scaring people off. Not that the BSD license assuages my concerns about community weirdness (hard to describe, but this ia a very personal opinion and you can dismiss it), but I would like to see if the demand will drive open sourcing the code.

Also very cool is that you can find Shen implementations in more than one flavor: Common Lisp, Clojure, Ruby, and more. Definitely check out the site if you have not yet.

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616c

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lomnakkus  11 years ago

That was a really weird "episode" in the history of Shen, IMO. I mean, the outcome was good and all, but it was really weird to ask for donations to change the license. I don't think there was any real explanation for that other that "we want money"?

  • doublec  11 years ago

    I believe it came from a discussion where to draft a new license would require the original developer to pay a lawyer. Someone suggested raising money to pay the developer the money to transition to BSD, a known license, instead of to a lawyer for yet another unknown license.

    • lomnakkus  11 years ago

      Wow, that's even weirder than I imagined. Regardless, I'm glad it's been freed due to the generosity of some individuals :)