[IAEP] Scratch license

[Bill Kerr]

I blogged about this issue, citing comments here from tom, myself and pamela
and mitch resnick has replied on my blog (3rd comment)

http://billkerr2.blogspot.com/2008/11/scratch-license-disappointment.html



On Sat, Nov 15, 2008 at 12:46 PM, Pamela Jones <pj2 at groklaw.net> wrote:

> 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?
>>
>>
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