[IAEP] Scratch license

[Jonas Smedegaard]

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Hi Tom, Bill and others,

On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 10:34:28PM -0500, Tom Hoffman wrote:
>Scratch is, or should be a trademark.

[details snipped]

>Mozilla has very strict terms for trademark use -- so much so that it
>is called Iceweasel in Debian:
>http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/trademarks/
>
>I suspect Scratch would want to find some language which says "you may
>only call this Scratch if you have not modified the source."
>Ultimately, IANAL, and I don't know *exactly* how to do it, but it is
>in this ballpark.

To me, this seems like a good approach to protect the _branding_ value 
of your marvellous product, while allowing uncontrolled growth - which 
includes the risk of forks.

Through this similar dilemma I now much better understand the 
"hysterical" trademark standpoint of Mozilla.


Earlier, Mitch Resnick wrote (proxied by Bill Kerr):
>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?

I welcome this approach, and have no better idea to solve the dilemma.

It would certainly be better in my opinion if you could see the benefit 
of more widespread distribution of Scratch as outweighing the danger of 
loosing touch (or control) with your users. But I respect if your 
judgement on this.


  - Jonas

Debian developer


- -- 
* Jonas Smedegaard - idealist og Internet-arkitekt
* Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

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