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License issues with Scratch and Squeek resolved?License issues with Scratch and Squeek resolved?Posted Jun 29, 2010 21:38 UTC (Tue) by dwheeler (guest, #1216)Parent article: Programming with Scratch (Linux Journal)
Last I saw, there were many licensing issues. Have they been resolved?
There may be some issues with the Scratch source code license.
Historically, the big problem has been Squeak's license (Scratch is written in Squeak; Squeak is an implementation of the Smalltalk-80 language). Looks like that problem, at least, has been resolved: http://www.squeak.org/SqueakLicense/
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License issues with Scratch and Squeek resolved? Posted Jun 30, 2010 4:17 UTC (Wed) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]
From what I can tell on the site, there are no licensing "issues" to "resolve". The licensing terms are their deliberate choice.
The uploading restriction is to avoid confusion between their official version and derivatives. But in addition, they only allow non-commercial derivatives, so it's not free software. That is their choice, not a problem that they need to resolve.
License issues with Scratch and Squeek resolved? Posted Jun 30, 2010 13:41 UTC (Wed) by dwheeler (guest, #1216) [Link]
> From what I can tell on the site, there are no licensing "issues" to "resolve". The licensing terms are their deliberate choice.
> ... [and] they only allow non-commercial derivatives, so it's not free software. That is their choice, not a problem that they need to resolve.
Perhaps it'd be better stated that there is a problem in that many people seem to think that Scratch is FLOSS, even though it is not. Many posts, such as http://www.openscience.org/blog/?p=211 and http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10041584-16.html refer to it as being "open source", but it appears that it is not open source software at all. Thus, it can't be put in FLOSS repositories like Fedora's, you can't use it for many purposes, and so on.
It would be better if the Scratch folks *specifically* stated on their site that their software is *NOT* open source software, since this seems to be a common misunderstanding. That way, that misunderstanding would be cleared up immediately.
License issues with Scratch and Squeek resolved? Posted Jun 30, 2010 13:44 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
Sometimes, upstream projects do not understand the implications of their licensing choices and resolve licensing issues after being in touch with distributions that won't distribute their software under the original licensing terms. So, yes, it can both be a deliberate choice and still be a issue from the perspective of downstreams.
License issues with Scratch and Squeek resolved? Posted Jun 30, 2010 19:52 UTC (Wed) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]
Strangely, the license that they say it's under on their website:
http://info.scratch.mit.edu/Scratch_License/1.4License has none of the negative attributes that the summary says the license has on this page: http://info.scratch.mit.edu/Source_Code and that the actual license contained in the tarball has.
So it looks to me like someone had a last minute change-of-heart, probably without fully understanding the impact of their license changes.
License issues with Scratch and Squeek resolved? Posted Jun 30, 2010 19:52 UTC (Wed) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]
For reference, here's the actual license:
===================== Scratch Source Code License
Copyright (c) 2009 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All Rights Reserved.
Scratch was developed by Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab. See scratch.mit.edu.
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of the Scratch source code and accompanying documentation (the "Software"), to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, or distribute the Software or software derived from it ("Derivative Works") for non-commercial purposes, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
1. The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies of the Software and Derivative Works.
2. The word "Scratch" shall not be used to refer to Derivative Works except in the phrase "Based on Scratch from the MIT Media Lab" provided that such phrase is not used to promote the Derivative Work or to imply that MIT endorses you or the Derivative Work.
3. Derivative Works shall not use the Scratch logo or the (copyrighted) default Scratch sprite cat used in the official Scratch software distributed in binary form by the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab.
4. Derivative Works shall not implement or enable any feature that would allow uploading Scratch projects to any MIT Scratch website (currently http://scratch.mit.edu).
5. The source code for any Derivative Work based on this software shall be made readily available to the public, ideally on a public web site, free of charge.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
Non-commercial use only Posted Jun 30, 2010 21:04 UTC (Wed) by dwheeler (guest, #1216) [Link] It says "non-commercial" use only. Therefore, it is not open source software.
Non-commercial use only Posted Jul 1, 2010 19:51 UTC (Thu) by Hawke (subscriber, #6978) [Link]
...at least not OSI-approved Open Source.
License issues with Scratch and Squeek resolved? Posted Jul 1, 2010 0:11 UTC (Thu) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] So it looks to me like someone had a last minute change-of-heart Not exactly. The version 1.4 link that you supply is only for binaries. It looks superficially like the usual MIT licence, but note that it does not include the words "modify" and "merge" among the things you are allowed to do with it. Their source code is available only for version 1.2 and under a different licence, quoted by foom above.
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