[IAEP] Scratch license

[Tom Hoffman]

On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 6:42 PM, Bill Kerr <billkerr at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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)"

Reading over this again, it probably comes down to a deeper issue than
trademarks, and the non-commercial part seems like a red herring.  The
problem is that the Scratch team doesn't care about your freedom, they
prefer a locked-in community they can control, and they aren't
particularly interested in collaboration, so it simply isn't apparent
at all what their motivation for trying to come up with an open source
licensing scheme is other than perhaps political correctness.  Whether
a code or community fork is commercial or not seems beside the point.

The fact of the matter is research is fundamentally about control --
that's why they call them controlled experiments!  And educational
researchers are, by their nature, are interested in testing *their*
theories, and they don't want their work being used to test or
implement someone else's.  It is their natural point of view, and it
is not friendly to software freedom.

I think these half-measures to be kind of open source but not really
are unenforceable, ambiguous (and smart people avoid redistributing
ambiguously licensed-software), and do much more harm to the
educational technology community than simply applying a proprietary
license would.  Of course, I'd prefer if Scratch was unambiguously
open source, but it doesn't appear that the team believes in that.

--Tom