On Sat, Nov 15, 2008 at 11:15 AM, Bill Kerr <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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? > http://scratch.mit.edu/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=77849#p77849 my response on the scratch forum: hi Andres, 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. I don't follow why Scratch is special because it is for beginners. 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 Tom Hoffman provided some good advice on the IAEP forum about Trademarks http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2008-November/002517.html 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. 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. 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. 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.
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