Presenting Dossier Scuola and... Scratch license
Hi all,
I am Luca Ferroni and I am the coordinator of "Dossier Scuola"
a document for Free Software in education. It includes:
* motivations for using Free Software in Education,
* suggestions to change management in schools,
* just some examples of (easy to use) free software for specific lessons or class support
* experiences of adoption (mainly) in Italy,
* and projects
Among projects there is also Debian-Edu / Skolelinux thanks to Claudio Carboncini
that presented it to us and translated documentation.
First of all: thanks for your great work we have installed it in a school of our city and we plan
to do some more installations.
Now I do not want to steal too much time to your work. I am writing to you because
Riccardo, a friend of mine, and also one of the main collaborators of Dossier Scuola,
who is reading this list, has forwarded to me a message in which you are discussing about Scratch license.
Which unfortunately is not Free Software (I read also: bug #471927
RFP: scratch -- easy programming environment designed for kids)
Some month ago, I had the same problem with Dossier Scuola: Scratch was included in software list,
but I had to cut it from there because it is not free software.
We also have our bug #144 - italian only, but inside there is
also this reference of a guy that wrote to Help@Scratch
http://freesoftware.zona-m.net/two-questions-about-free-software-development-copyright-assignment-and-non-commercial-use/
The ticket is still open, I proposed to write to MIT and ask them
if it would be possible to release Scratch with a free license.
This would have following benefit:
* include Scratch in Debian-Edu and Dossier Scuola and other free distributions
* avoid free software compliant developers to waste their time in wondering if Scratch is acceptable or not
I think that our group, and other groups (like this) could promise to give "some visibility" to MIT for this action. And also the Free Software Foundation.
Despite all, as long as you can read in the link freesoftware.zona-m.net that I providet to you, they say
that it is mainly an "early days" matter:
You are correct. The non-commercial clause just means that you can’t make a modification and then sell the finished product. It’s totally fine to pay programmers to work on it… |[that clause is there because]| especially in the early days of Scratch before it was well known, we wanted to be sure
some company with a big marketing budget didn’t take the code, change the About page, and then sell it to schools for $50 a license. We’re a non-profit, and our marketing budget is $0, so we have to be careful about such things.
I see that you pointed out another argument in bug #471927:
you cannot implement the ability to upload projects to any MIT Scratch website (currently,http://scratch.mit.edu),
applying a free software license would mean to erase also this clause
What do you think about my proposal of writing a letter to MIT for freeing Scratch?
Would debian-edu sign it?
Do you think we could promise to give visibility to MIT if they take this action?
You can read more about me in my LinkedIn profile
http://www.linkedin.com/in/lucaferroni
the Dossier Scuola in www.dossiersuola.it/PaginaIniziale (italian only)
more on dossier scuola on
www.dossierscuola.it (some announcements, map of free software and school in Italy, resources,...)
Thank you for your time
Luca
--
Luca Ferroni
http://www.lucaferroni.it
Tel: +39 328 9639660
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/lucaferroni
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