Shen under BSD

[Mark Tarver]

The license question arises again ...

Some years ago I sat down and wrote a series of aphorisms about software development.  These aphorisms arise from Taoism and several sources.  You can find them here.  

http://marktarver.com/Philosophy/index.htm

One of them, aphorism 3 is applicable to this case

'... When we approach life ... seeing everything only in terms of what we can get out of it, careless of the consequences of our craving, we suck dry the resources that sustain us. The forests are felled, desert and scrub take hold, animals go extinct, the land blows away as dust and people die or walk away.'

I think I've reached that point here.  This leaves the question of the license unresolved. In fact this issue has been rumbling on since 2005 when people objected even to GPL (look back in this group and you'll see legions complaining about GPL).   The current license is much more tolerant than the GPL.  However people still seem to rage about the license and demand to get what they want for nothing. 

Now Smita has made a suggestion which meets the needs of both parties.  Pay for BSD.  This is a sensible suggestion because it demarcates those who want something for nothing from those who are willing to give something for what they want.  If people want to pay me for BSD, rather than a lawyer as Aditya suggested, this will help my situation a lot! 

A lawyer, even a low end lawyer, is probably £250 per hour and redrafting a new license is, conservatively, a week's work, say 35 hours.  Multiply the two and you get £8750.  So let's fix £8500 on the BSD.  I've put the proposal up on the Shen homepage and people can write pledges.  If we make it and the pledges are honoured, then I'll turn Shen over to BSD.  If not, then the whole license question is dusted and done with.

Mark

[Artella Coding]

I watched a talk by Bodil Stokke recently (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHubfS8E--o), and in her talk she mentioned the license of Shen, but then went on to say that if license really was a problem then Clojure (which is under this license http://opensource.org/licenses/eclipse-1.0.php) would probably have never taken off. She mentions this 7 minutes into the talk. Just thought that this might be relevant to this thread. 

[Mark Tarver]

Qi I was under GPL; which was never popular.  But if you look at the growth rate of the two groups, you'll find that Clojure grew more rapidly by far.  I don't believe that this was a function of the license.  It was a function of two factors.

First, as Rich himself said 'Clojure is mostly unoriginal'.  Actually this was a big advantage because it meant that migrating from Scheme or Common Lisp to Clojure did not involve a learning curve.  Second biggie, the connection to the Java base.  Third, decent concurrency.   Clojure was engineered from the outset by a commercial programmer for commercial applications.

Qi shared none of these features.  Also Rich kept a low profile; did not criticise CL or OS philosophy and got on with quietly making Datomic closed source apps.  I publicly criticised both (w. no regrets btw).

It took 40+ years of  diffusing Lisp consciousness to create a supersaturated solution in which Clojure could flourish.   Shen is working from  a base where some of the basic concepts are not understood.  

Mark

[fuzzy wozzy]

three things shen got going for itself

1) volunteers devoting umpteen amount of time and energy for the enhancement of shen
2) willing of of Dr. Tarver, in case you didn't know his name, to bend rules and accommodate more than necessary, really
3) growing dissatisfaction with object program which is but a thin disguise of functional paradigm, which Shen embodies

I don't believe that clojure's success is due to easy transition from cl to cloure when you have millions of assembly language
programmers willing to devote umpteen amount of time to push metal to the petal

[fuzzy wozzy]

and when you realize that Alan Turing himself could not understand why anyone would be crazy enough to want to

program in anything other than Assembly Language, and I believe he meant programming in 1's and 0's, then you realize
how facile Shen makes programming to be and how aburd it is to argue about CL vs. Clojusre vs. Lisp.

[Greg Spurrier]

I like this approach. Thank you for offering it as a possibility. I've pledged and I encourage others to do so.

Greg

Sent from my iPhone

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Shen" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to qilang+un...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to qil...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/qilang.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Willi Riha]

re 1) there are several people who have ported Shen to other platforms and have, undoubtedly,  spent a lot of time on it. This is a great achievement, but I would not call it an "enhancement" of Shen. You make an enhancement, if you contribute useful Shen functions, in particular, libraries or applications of one sort or another - I am still waiting for contributors!

re 2) I agree!

re 3) OOP and functional programming are two entirely different paradigms - I do not want to start a discussion on this!

Willi

--

[Raoul Duke]

> object program which is but a thin disguise
> of functional paradigm, which Shen embodies

hardly. :-)
http://goo.gl/Id1f9p

[fuzzy wozzy]

 in chapter 2 section 5, of let over lambda  (some parts available for online reading on the author's website),
the author mentions clos as one of the most powerful object systems out there,
then quickly adds that he seldom needs to use its more advanced features,
thanks to assignable value cells and lambda expressions.
(which may be all that's needed to do clos without clos)
Object system is a concept adopted from Lisp.
Lisp embodies OOP; OOP does not embody Lisp.

[Mark Tarver]

The thing about Lisp, or specifically Common Lisp, is that it is huge.  There is a computational core that is purely functional and that is descended from Lisp 1.5 which is McCarthy's lovechild.  This computational core is not too far removed from KLambda in spirit.   But around that core is an aggregation of many many features from other styles so that CL is a mudball.  So if you think CL = FP then FP (functional programming) incorporates many things - including O-O programming, LOOPs and GO TO!  Most programmers accept that CL <> FP and then divide over whether this is a good thing.  

Mark 

[Thomas Bartscher]

I hope I didn't miss it, but: How do you decide when this has failed? Is there a fixed time period?

[Mark Tarver]

The BSD appeal page (http://www.shenlanguage.org/shenbsd.htm) says 

"If the drive reaches the required amount of £8500 by or before the 5th of December 2014 you will be posted."

So that is our review period; and you can follow the course of the appeal on the page

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

Perhaps everybody, including the OS community, is learning something from this appeal.  It's important for the greater good that Shen enter the common mindshare.  It is also important for the greater good that the community learns to value artists as people and not only for what can be got for free from them.  So some quite important principles at stake here!

We keep going for success until we get it and put failure aside.  

Mark  

[Marko Kocić]

Hi Mark,

Have you thought maybe about putting up a Kickstrarter campaign? It might give a pledge better visibility.
Also, even if it stays on Shen homepage, it probably needs to be more visible. Putting it on top of the page right after title in red color would bring more attention. Like now, it's pretty invisible. I had problems trying to find it even though I heard about it from your group announcement.

Best regards,
Marko

[Thomas Bartscher]

Ah thanks, I missed that.

[Jacob]

Apparently, the license is a contentious issue.  You know how I can tell this(other than it being painfully obvious...), this post has gotten more views, in a couple of days, than any other post for a long time.  This group seems rather lifeless; you make one post about the license and blam!  Out of the dark caves of the abyss, neckbeards from all over the land Lonelivania are chomping at the bit for a new license.  I hope Shen makes it, only so that us cave dwellers can get some vitamin d!

[Mark Tarver]

On Wednesday, 8 October 2014 16:01:43 UTC+1, Marko Kocić wrote:

Hi Mark,

Have you thought maybe about putting up a Kickstrarter campaign? It might give a pledge better visibility.

I thought about that; but it did not seem like a Kickstarter thing; it is not a project as such but a proposal.  Also we have more control over  certain aspects of the appeal by not going that route.

Also, even if it stays on Shen homepage, it probably needs to be more visible. Putting it on top of the page right after title in red color would bring more attention. Like now, it's pretty invisible. I had problems trying to find it even though I heard about it from your group announcement.

Fair point.  I've made it more prominent.

Mark

[Mark Tarver]

There is a depth of feeling about this in some quarters; hopefully they can sublimate it and do something constructive at the same time by making a contribution.

Mark

[deech]

What happens to the donated money if the goal is not reached?
-deech

[Mark Tarver]

There isn't any donated money - these are pledges.

Mark

[tycho luyben]

If you read proggit / HN / IRC, every time when Shen comes up, people will without fail toss the idea of doing anything with Shen aside because of the license. 

People are not against commercial licenses (although for programming languages / commodity platforms like web frameworks it would mean they will never 

get any serious backing, even MS is seeing that and is open sourcing these commodity parts of the Windows infrastructure), however they are against the type 

of license Shen uses. The 'normal way' would be something like BSD/LGPL with an extra rule which states that you cannot use the Shen name if you make a 

derivative which doesn't pass the test suite. So if you would call it Glen it would be allowed; that happens more often and makes sense. This is license is not like that though and 

it is also formulated in a way which doesn't really work with software in court; aka if I do a platform port writing everything myself and call it Potato while being 100%

Shen compatible it would be ok in court. 

I believe that many people would use this and port this and work on Shen if it had a normal open source license and hence I pledged, but with mixed feeling, for instance

I would like to know why one would actually need a lawyer for this at all. 

But yes, for such a nice language the uptake is hampered almost solely by the license in my opinion (which is backed by the comments on the net). 

[Mark Tarver]

I believe that many people would use this and port this and work on Shen if it had a normal open source license and hence I pledged, but with mixed feeling, for instance

I would like to know why one would actually need a lawyer for this at all. 

There is no lawyer involved here.  The history was - Aditya suggested hiring a lawyer to reformulate the license.  Smita suggested instead paying me the same money to go BSD and I said - yes, ok.  

Mark 

[tycho luyben]

Ok, thanks. That would make the amount more flexible I guess, so more of a donation kind of thing? My pledge was added now; needs more action in the techie news press to make the amount. And if not for the lawyer it can be an Kickstarter thing no? I see there was talk of that and that this is not a project but a proposal; it can be easily changed to that though; BSD it, official compiler specs and reference implementations, shen-in-shen, tack on more libs and more (stable / fast) platforms and you have a (nice) project. A project people would (imho) be interested in. As a scripting language, to extend (it is so tiny and flexible that you can easily add features for PhDs etc without actually having to dive into a complexer runtime/compiler for months) etc. 

[Mark Tarver]

On Friday, October 31, 2014 9:13:00 AM UTC, tycho luyben wrote:

Ok, thanks. That would make the amount more flexible I guess, so more of a donation kind of thing?

I wouldn't call it that.  Rather more that 'Here is something people want' and here is an exchange.   Really based on very old market principles.   

 

My pledge was added now; needs more action in the techie news press to make the amount. And if not for the lawyer it can be an Kickstarter thing no? I see there was talk of that and that this is not a project but a proposal; it can be easily changed to that though; BSD it, official compiler specs and reference implementations, shen-in-shen, tack on more libs and more (stable / fast) platforms and you have a (nice) project. A project people would (imho) be interested in. As a scripting language, to extend (it is so tiny and flexible that you can easily add features for PhDs etc without actually having to dive into a complexer runtime/compiler for months) etc. 

There was a project proposal http://www.shenlanguage.org/appeal.html last year.

[tycho luyben]

Shame I did not see Shen last year. I was mucking around with Idris at that time (still am but now also Shen; trying to do a port and I guess shen-in-shen as it seems easier to do it that way).