"Part of our motivation in maintaining a tight spec and a reliable platform is to hold the Shen community together so that we do not splinter our resources on multiple incompatible forks. We do not want multiple incompatible dialects of Shen, multiple compilers, multiple incompatible libraries. We want $free readable libraries that work for all of us and libraries we can pick up and use without worrying about compatibility. Hence the production of derivative non-conforming programs from our source, whether called Shen, Shin, Shine or Shoo, is barred by the license. To give up on this is to give up on the motivation for Shen."
Whilst avoiding forking prevents splintering it can also be dangerous. OCaml suffers from a similar restriction which has seriously impeded the development and use of new compiler features like staged compilation (http://www.metaocaml.org/), type-safe marshalling (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~pes20/hashcaml/) and delimited continuations (http://groups.google.com/group/fa.caml/browse_thread/thread/...). INRIA rarely accept new features into official distribution and the license prevents anyone else from doing so. Extensions have to be distributed as patches and inevitably bitrot.
Tying the long-term viability of a language (or spec) to a single owner rings alarm bells for me. Clearly they want to avoid another Scheme but I've had bad experiences in both directions.
Tarver would be better off letting go of his urge to tinker with licenses and just run with one of the existing options. The risk posed by suboptimal licensing is negligible compared to the risk of his radical new language not getting used at all, and every time people get distracted by nitpicking license terms -- as they invariably do -- a significant portion of the tiny and precious attention budget for Qi/Shen gets blown through. This is a shame.
"Part of our motivation in maintaining a tight spec and a reliable platform is to hold the Shen community together so that we do not splinter our resources on multiple incompatible forks. We do not want multiple incompatible dialects of Shen, multiple compilers, multiple incompatible libraries. We want $free readable libraries that work for all of us and libraries we can pick up and use without worrying about compatibility. Hence the production of derivative non-conforming programs from our source, whether called Shen, Shin, Shine or Shoo, is barred by the license. To give up on this is to give up on the motivation for Shen."
Whilst avoiding forking prevents splintering it can also be dangerous. OCaml suffers from a similar restriction which has seriously impeded the development and use of new compiler features like staged compilation (http://www.metaocaml.org/), type-safe marshalling (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~pes20/hashcaml/) and delimited continuations (http://groups.google.com/group/fa.caml/browse_thread/thread/...). INRIA rarely accept new features into official distribution and the license prevents anyone else from doing so. Extensions have to be distributed as patches and inevitably bitrot.
Tying the long-term viability of a language (or spec) to a single owner rings alarm bells for me. Clearly they want to avoid another Scheme but I've had bad experiences in both directions.