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. <div style="margin-left: 40px;">"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)" </div> <div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Nov 9, 2008 at 12:19 PM, Bill Kerr <<a href="mailto:billkerr@gmail.com">billkerr@gmail.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> I have edited my initial post on this thread and posted to the Scratch forum: <a href="http://scratch.mit.edu/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=76772#p76772" target="_blank">http://scratch.mit.edu/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=76772#p76772</a> (also forwarded a copy to mitch resnick and invited him to comment here) </blockquote></div>