I am confused about all these licensing "problems" everyone is talking about here. Could you enlighten me?
Sure, Ocaml and shen have "weird" licenses but I just read through them in the last few minutes and see no major issues.
The licenses for both only effect the code for the language interpreter/compiler and associated libraries itself and should have little to no effect on your own code.
If you use MIT/BSD licenses then you are almost certainly fine, with GPL there are some potential issues but most people think that dynamic linking doesn't count as "linking" in the lawyer sense and, therefore, using GPL code with something like Shen would be fine. This hasn't been tested in the courts AFAIK.
The problem you haven't noticed is that the language covering what you care about, using Shen to write programs, is in many places (potentially at least 7 by a count I just made), and you, or, say a lawyer for your company, has to read and understand the whole huge thing to make sure your intended use is OK. And that the multiple times it tries to say the same thing are not ambiguous.
It's also explicitly not open source ("We are therefore not open source."), and should you find yourself needing to fix a bug in a language implementation your legal burden massively increases.
Compare this to the licenses you name, they're all well understood, and in at least some cases validated in court. For that matter, the GPL has been validated in at least US and German courts.
As for Ocaml, it uses the Q Public License (as well as the LGPL); it's short and a quick glance didn't indicate it tries to say the same thing more than once. It's been around for a while, to the point it's an OSI and FSF approved licence, so others have looked at it, as they did for Qt prior to version 4.0., and KDE based on it prior to then. About which there was much todo, so it's be thoroughly analyzed.
So it may be "weird", but it's significantly more palatable than Shen's license.
To qualify my original statement much later, I was told offhand by people Ocaml's multi-core processor/SMP limitations continue to exist (I know Jane Street actually is putting up money to change this) because the license of Ocaml prohibited people from making any other forked implementation of Ocaml itself. Thus, it has been single-core only for many years later, because Xavier and the core team did not think SMP implementation was a priority, and have not been asked since.
Granted, I very seemingly little about this. So I could be very mistaken. Can some confirm I am wrong? I am sure someone here has far more detail than me generalized nonsense.
Sure, Ocaml and shen have "weird" licenses but I just read through them in the last few minutes and see no major issues.
The licenses for both only effect the code for the language interpreter/compiler and associated libraries itself and should have little to no effect on your own code.
If you use MIT/BSD licenses then you are almost certainly fine, with GPL there are some potential issues but most people think that dynamic linking doesn't count as "linking" in the lawyer sense and, therefore, using GPL code with something like Shen would be fine. This hasn't been tested in the courts AFAIK.