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The license was introduced before Shen was issued in September 2011 (the license came out in June) and for a year or so the only specification was Shendoc (now Shendoc 16). The understanding was that Shen was specified in that document and what was not covered by Shendoc was covered by 'Functional Programming in Qi'. Later a hurriedly introduced text 'The Book of Shen (first edition)' (TBoS) was produced to fill a gap (2012) and this year (January 2014) a more thorough 2nd edition of TBoS (> 400 pages) was published which fixes the language standard very thoroughly. This is currently the canonical standard. You can find a link to that book on the Shen home page.

http://www.fast-print.net/bookshop/1506/the-book-of-shen-sec...

Shen is now very stable and has been for nearly two years. At my suggestion, I posited that it might be better to move the standard to a computable series of tests and this was floated to the 2011 committee that is responsible jointly for all the ports.

http://shenlanguage.org/2011committee.html

Such a change requires the unanimous consent of all the people involved and it seems we have this and a reworded simplified license.

The only obstacle is the work needed to put this test suite together. I've suggested that this suite might be assembled in Github, though for legal reasons the final version must be put in a publicly accessible but tamper-proof place.

Since the type-integrity given out by the system is not better than the strength of the kernel, we take kernel work very seriously. There is already a suite of 126 tests that I run every Shen port through and 2011 members echo these tests. But this informal test suite needs to be amped up to several hundred tests to approach what I consider to be an adequate test suite. It is very boring but important work. So far I have begun assembling all the programs in TBoS into this suite.

These license issues really only affect people who are deeply involved in kernel work and as far as application programmers are concerned, I doubt that it affects them much at all. As far as graphics, concurrency, FFI etc. and add-ons are concerned there are no restrictions. Likewise none on closed source work.