[IAEP] Scratch license

[Bill Kerr]

Mitch Resnick responded to my query as follows. I replied by saying I was
not an expert on licensing and / or open source but that people on the IAEP
list (and Tom) would be certain to provide some useful feedback.

"Hi Bill. To be honest, we've had a lot of uncertainty about what type of
license is best for Scratch. We don't have any problem allowing commercial
use of the Scratch binary (and are planning to update the license
accordingly). But several people in our group have reservations about
allowing commercial use of the Scratch source code. One main reason: We are
concerned about multiple forks that could be confusing to users. We have put
a lot of effort into building an online community around Scratch, so we
don't want the community to fragment. Also, Scratch is based on some core
educational ideas, and we are worried that alternate versions might not be
consistent with these educational ideas, thus muddying the educational
message underlying Scratch.

Our current thinking is to create our own Linux version of Scratch, and then
allow commercial use of the source (since we feel that there will be less
reason for people to make forks, once we have create an "official" Linux
version of Scratch).

But, as I said, we're not sure about this reasoning. We'd be interested to
hear your opinion. Do you have any thoughts or suggestions?

Mitch Resnick (for the MIT Scratch Team)"



On Sun, Nov 9, 2008 at 12:19 PM, Bill Kerr <billkerr at gmail.com> wrote:

> I have edited my initial post on this thread and posted to the Scratch
> forum:
>
> http://scratch.mit.edu/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=76772#p76772
>
> (also forwarded a copy to mitch resnick and invited him to comment here)
>
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