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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So he wants a certain amount of money, essentially a payment to change the license. I don't understand the connection to hiring a lawyer but whatever...
Tarver claims the current license is more open than the GPL. I don't understand the basis for that claim.
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.
> Shen is a portable functional programming language that offers pattern matching, lambda calculus consistency, macros, optional lazy evaluation, static type checking, an integrated fully functional Prolog, and an inbuilt compiler-compiler.
> Shen has one of the most powerful type systems within functional programming. Shen runs under a reduced instruction Lisp and is designed for portability. The word ‘Shen’ is Chinese for 'spirit' and our motto reflects our desire to liberate our work to live under many platforms.
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.