[IAEP] Scratch license

[Pamela Jones]

Um.  If you are trying to avoid forks, why would you want to allow 
commercial?  That inevitably results in forks, with some code going dark.

Have you thought about LGPL?  It allows commercial entities to use the 
code without worry while protecting the codebase.

I would strongly suggest you speak to Software Freedom Law Center. This 
is exactly what they do. If you want an MIT-style license, they can help 
you with this too. It's ultimately up to you, but doing a license 
without a lawyer never works.

PJ

Bill Kerr wrote:
> Scratch forum:
> http://scratch.mit.edu/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=77320#p77320
> 
>>From Andres Monroy-Hernandez, Scratch Team at the MIT Media Lab:
> 
> There has been some discussion in the Scratch Team about this. Overall our
> concern is to avoid forks. In general forks are good because bring diversity
> but since Scratch is a tool for beginners we're worried about having
> multiple versions out there. This happened a little bit with Scratch's
> predecessor LOGO, there were a lot of versions, some of them incompatible.
> 
> I am an Ubuntu user and I appreciate the choices I have for every element of
> the OS, but I do spend hours trying to figure out between apt-get and
> aptitute, Compiz vs no compiz, KDE vs Gnome vs Xfce, etc, etc. In some ways,
> Ubuntu has been able to succeed by providing something that works out of the
> box without forcing users to choose.
> 
> I think we are going to change the license of the binary distribution to
> allow for commercial use but we're uncertain about the source. What do you
> think about forking in Scratch?
>