I think we're agreed that the present approach is not optimal. I share your concerns about having to "run it by legal".
I would prefer the Comments section to be preceded by a highly explicit statement of intention:
"End of the license text. The following statements are the copyright holder's comments on the license and in no way add any terms or conditions to those given above."
Or something like that. Better yet, the comments could be moved to a separate file; but now I'm repeating myself...
I also share your interpretation of the motives. I read carefully all of the material linked from Dr. Tarver's recent license-related posts to the Shen mailing list, and your replies as well.
The sentence under Comments that is causing confusion reads: "This work may be placed under any license of choice except GPL..."
The subject of the previous sentence is "original code", which leads me to understand "[t]his work" as referring to the same. But perhaps you're correct and it's referring back to Shen itself.
Just about exactly that was proposed by someone, and implicitly rejected in the redraft :-(.
Erk, I think you're interpretation is "right", as in that's the clearest way to read those sentences. I was going by one reading of the intent from the historical discussion, which matters less than the actual legal language.
His intent might be exactly this, a Shen distribution cannot include GPLed code you write because of what he believes about the virality of the GPL, and the very bad behavior he's noted from RMS/FSF/SFLC (that I personally attested to/added from the '80s). As I recall, he also was unhappy with how GPLing Qi V1 worked out, or didn't, but you don't really need all that to treat the GPL like garlic and holy water, e.g. I've noted that the most successful implementations of niche languages have less severe licences.
Yep, "run it by legal", which just isn't going to work when there are so many competitive languages, e.g. other Lisps including the very tasty Clojure, and non-Lispy functional languages which Shen is trying to make Lisp competitive with.
I would prefer the Comments section to be preceded by a highly explicit statement of intention:
"End of the license text. The following statements are the copyright holder's comments on the license and in no way add any terms or conditions to those given above."
Or something like that. Better yet, the comments could be moved to a separate file; but now I'm repeating myself...
I also share your interpretation of the motives. I read carefully all of the material linked from Dr. Tarver's recent license-related posts to the Shen mailing list, and your replies as well.
The sentence under Comments that is causing confusion reads: "This work may be placed under any license of choice except GPL..."
The subject of the previous sentence is "original code", which leads me to understand "[t]his work" as referring to the same. But perhaps you're correct and it's referring back to Shen itself.