[IAEP] Next slobs meeting?

[Bernie Innocenti]

On Sun, 2011-06-05 at 04:03 +0200, Christoph Derndorfer wrote:
> Am 05.06.2011 02:57, schrieb Bernie Innocenti:
> > I'd like to propose the following agenda topics:
> > 
> >  * Membership fees
> 
> Could you elaborate what you have in mind here? :-)

It's a prototype idea, not yet discussed anywhere yet. I'd like to know
what the board members would think about asking a yearly fee from
members and, in case there's interest, how it could be implemented.

I've done some research on how other foundations and free software
projects like us handle memberships, but I've not yet made my mind on
what works best.


> Oh, and what about the licensing issue, has that topic been settled or
> will it require further discussion among the SLOBs and/or the larger
> community?

We've discussed Scratch's licensing issues last week on #sugar and then
on #acetarium (a social channel in which some Media Lab folks hang out).

The very short summary is that there are two different licenses for
Scratch: one for the source code, which prohibits calling the resulting
binary Scratch and uploading projects to the website, and one for
binaries, which doesn't allow modification. It's hard to notice the
problem, because they don't mention it even in the license FAQ.

I'm not in direct contact with whoever came up with these licensing
terms, I've just been told that someone at the Media Lab was afraid
that, if Scratch were distributed as free software, people would create
incompatible forks of the language. Then one would wonder why popular
free software languages such as Python, PHP, Perl and Ruby haven't ever
been forked. There are better ways than a non-free license to prevent
fragmentation.

As things stand, Scratch is in violation of our licensing policy (which
coincides with the licensing policy of Fedora and most distributions).
We could make an exception just for Scratch because it's so popular, but
now there are additional complications. TOAST, which adheres to
Trisquel's free software rules, can't even distribute the Sugar with the
activity updater pointing at ASLO until we remove Scratch.

I'd like to discuss our options during the next board meeting. (until
then, let's try to avoid having another licensing flame on iaep)

-- 
Bernie Innocenti
Sugar Labs Infrastructure Team
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Infrastructure_Team