On Sat, Nov 15, 2008 at 11:15 AM, Bill Kerr <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:billkerr@gmail.com" target="_blank">billkerr@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Scratch forum:<br><a href="http://scratch.mit.edu/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=77320#p77320" target="_blank">http://scratch.mit.edu/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=77320#p77320</a><br><br>From Andres Monroy-Hernandez, Scratch Team at the MIT Media Lab:<br>
<br><div style="margin-left: 40px;">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.<br><br>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. <br><br>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?</div></blockquote><div><br><a href="http://scratch.mit.edu/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=77849#p77849" target="_blank">http://scratch.mit.edu/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=77849#p77849</a><br>
my response on the scratch forum:<br></div></div><br><div style="margin-left: 40px;">hi Andres,<br><br>I'd like to see the widest possible distribution of
the current or up-to-date version of Scratch to the children of the
world. This includes distribution through the OLPC and Sugar (which are
no longer the same thing and Sugar is now being ported to various
platforms). From my understanding this will not happen if you keep the
new non commercial license since some Linux distributions will not
include Scratch under that license. Ironic voice: The Scratch team has
forked Scratch by changing the license.<br><br>I don't follow why Scratch is special because it is for beginners. <br><br>It
also seems to me that FLOSS has a far bigger and more influential
footprint now than when Seymour Papert / LCSI went commercial with
LogoWriter / MicroWorlds and you need to take that into consideration.
Thanks, of course, to the hard work of FLOSS advocates<br><br>Tom Hoffman provided some good advice on the IAEP forum about Trademarks<br><a href="http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2008-November/002517.html">http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2008-November/002517.html</a><br>
<br>Comparison
with LOGO: Well, the versions of LOGO that are going out on OLPC /
Sugar are Turtle Art (cut down, developed by Brian Silverman) and Brian
Harvey's logo (powerful but non intuitive user interface last time I
saw it). It's the Open Source versions which will go out to the poorest
children of the world. In that sense it's very fortunate that there
were forks in logo, that the commercial versions were not the only ones.<br><br>I
love logo and used it for over a decade as a school teacher, mainly
LogoWriter, then MicroWorlds, ie. commercial versions. Eventually I
stopped using Logo because it wasn't free and another free (but not
open source) alternative came along (Game Maker) which had a great UI
and a lot of appeal for many students (but not as good in terms of its
deep educational philosophy). But now I have stopped using GameMaker,
partly because it went commercial, and now use Scratch (which I see as
a version of Logo and has the best UI yet) as my main introduction to
visual programming for students. Teachers will chop and change like I
have. In general they are committed to easy to use software and are not
tuned in to complex legal arguments about licensing and its
implications. <br><br>However, as a teacher I would like to be able to
use the latest version of Scratch in Australia and use the same version
if I decided to travel to a developing country to work on the OLPC
project. Another hypothetical: It would also be great if African kids
in refugee camps working with XO's were working on the latest version
of Scratch before they came to Australia.<br><br>More
and more people, teachers and youth, are using Open Source and
understanding the politics of Open Source more. By changing the license
as you have you diminish the enthusiasm of some of those people for Scratch.
People chose software for a variety of reasons. The perception of
support for freedom being one of those reasons.<br></div>