windows 7 sins

Correction (28th August):
I have to withdraw my support from this FSF campaign owing to their attack on the xo in the education link of their site (click on the Learn More link at their site). They conclude:

... it is expected that the main effect of the OLPC project -- if it succeeds -- will be to turn millions of children into Microsoft dependents. That is a negative effect, to the point where the world would be better off if the OLPC project had never existed.

I think this is far too over zealous and purist. Also note that at this time not a single xo has shipped with Windows.

Update (2nd September): The section I was complaining about above has been removed and replaced with:

Microsoft is now targeting governments who are purchasing XOs, in an attempt to get them to replace the free software with Windows. It remains to be seen to what degree Microsoft will succeed. But with all of this pressure, Microsoft has harmed a project that has distributed more than 1 million laptops running free software, and has taken aim at the low-cost platform as a way to make poor children around the world dependent on its products. The OLPC threatens to become another example of the way Microsoft convinces governments around the world that an education involving computers must be synonymous with an education using Windows. In order to prevent this, it is vital that we work to raise global awareness of the harm Microsoft's involvement does to our children's education.

I did write a letter to Peter Brown of the FSF on the 29th August complaining about that section but so far have not received a reply.

Just for the record my original post is below (not altered apart from this correction):

As far as I can see the following indictment of Microsoft from the Free Software Foundation is entirely correct:

1. Poisoning education: Today, most children whose education involves computers are being taught to use one company's product: Microsoft's. Microsoft spends large sums on lobbyists and marketing to corrupt educational departments. An education using the power of computers should be a means to freedom and empowerment, not an avenue for one corporation to instill its monopoly.

2. Invading privacy: Microsoft uses software with backward names like Windows Genuine Advantage to inspect the contents of users' hard drives. The licensing agreement users are required to accept before using Windows warns that Microsoft claims the right to do this without warning.

3. Monopoly behavior: Nearly every computer purchased has Windows pre-installed -- but not by choice. Microsoft dictates requirements to hardware vendors, who will not offer PCs without Windows installed on them, despite many people asking for them. Even computers available with other operating systems like GNU/Linux pre-installed often had Windows on them first.

4. Lock-in: Microsoft regularly attempts to force updates on its users, by removing support for older versions of Windows and Office, and by inflating hardware requirements. For many people, this means having to throw away working computers just because they don't meet the unnecessary requirements for the new Windows versions.

5. Abusing standards: Microsoft has attempted to block free standardization of document formats, because standards like OpenDocument Format would threaten the control they have now over users via proprietary Word formats. They have engaged in underhanded behavior, including bribing officials, in an attempt to stop such efforts.

6. Enforcing Digital Restrictions Management (DRM): With Windows Media Player, Microsoft works in collusion with the big media companies to build restrictions on copying and playing media into their operating system. For example, at the request of NBC, Microsoft was able to prevent Windows users from recording television shows that they have the legal right to record.

7. Threatening user security: Windows has a long history of security vulnerabilities, enabling the spread of viruses and allowing remote users to take over people's computers for use in spam-sending botnets. Because the software is secret, all users are dependent on Microsoft to fix these problems -- but Microsoft has its own security interests at heart, not those of its users.

http://windows7sins.org/

scratch license disappointment

If there could be a synergy between free software and the best constructionist software then that would be so much better for the poorest children of the world ...

Unfortunately, the Scratch team at MIT Media Lab does not appear to support that. Very unfortunate because Scratch is currently the best available beginners constructionist software IMHO ... and Mitch Resnick is a great populariser of Scratch and has interesting theoretical ideas about learning (kindergarten metaphor, low floor wide walls)

However, I recently discovered (through Tom Hoffman), that the Scratch license has been changed from free to non commercial

The new license (1.3.1) says:

"Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and accompanying documentation and media files (the "Software") to distribute the Software for non-commercial purposes, including the right to use, copy, publish, or distribute copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so ..."

[[update (2nd December 2008): The Scratch binary license has been changed to allow commercial use]]

The previous license said (wording obtained from the folder containing my old copy of Scratch):

"Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and accompanying documentation and media files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so ..."

The right to modify Scratch has been taken out.

[[update (2nd December 2008): There are two Scratch licenses, one for the binary and another for the source. The source code license does allow modification. See comment by Mitch Resnick in response to this blog]]

This will effect the distribution of Scratch on Sugar, the software originally developed for the OLPC and now being ported to other platforms, to Debian at least and other Linux distributions. See Debian Bug report #471927

Tom Hoffman wrote in his blog on October 14th:

"Since it is un-free software it cannot be put in Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat, or any other free software distribution. Can it be shipped on the XO? This license significantly restricts the distribution of Scratch to children around the world, and to what benefit?"

I posted my query to the Scratch forum and received this reply from Andres Monroy-Hernandez of the 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?

This issue was then discussed on the IAEP (Its an education project) list and here are some of the responses:

Tom Hoffman:

Scratch is, or should be a trademark. Only MIT, or people they give permission to, can use it. Anyone else can fork their code, but they can't call it Scratch without permission. An example of this is from the Apache License:

6. Trademarks. This License does not grant permission to use the trade names, trademarks, service marks, or product names of the Licensor, except as required for the reasonable and customary use in describing the origin of the Work and reproducing the content of the NOTICE file.

Mozilla has very strict terms for trademark use -- so much so that it is called Iceweasel in Debian: http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/trademarks/

I suspect Scratch would want to find some language which says "you may only call this Scratch if you have not modified the source." Ultimately, IANAL, and I don't know *exactly* how to do it, but it is in this ballpark.

Me:

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

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 nderstanding 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.

Pamela Jones:

If you are trying to avoid forks, why would you want to allow commercial? That inevitably results in forks, with some code going dark.

Have you thought about LGPL? It allows commercial entities to use the code without worry while protecting the codebase.

I would strongly suggest you speak to Software Freedom Law Center. This is exactly what they do. If you want an MIT-style license, they can help you with this too. It's ultimately up to you, but doing a license without a lawyer never works.

This was weeks ago now and the response from the Scratch team is ... silence

Tom Hoffman has been arguing for a while now on his blog that MIT does not lead when it comes to software license issues. For example, this post about the StarLogo TNG License (October 17, 2007):

That MIT would choose such a license is not surprising. The failure of US universities to not only not lead in this area (particularly wrt K-12 ed-tech), but to not follow the commercial or increasingly governmental sectors is unfortunately quite evident. Fine. What they do with their IP is their business. However, this project is funded by an National Science Foundation grant. I don't understand why the NSF allows grantees to limit the distribution of software written with public funds in this way. It is a waste of my tax dollars.

What a pity. If there could be a synergy between free software and the best constructionist software then that would be so much better for the poorest children of the world ...

join the Free Software Foundation

Microsoft is stepping up their campaign to undermine linux (by claiming patent rights against the linux kernel and subverting Novell to the dark side). The centre of the resistance to this move is the Free Software Foundation. The fight back, led by Eben Moglen, is based around changing the GPL license, ie complex legal manouevring. One way to help is to become a member of the FSF, which involves a yearly donation. I just joined.

Some of the ways to become involved are:

• increase your understanding of the huge battle being waged over intellectual property - recent changes to Australian copyright law, Digital Right (Restrictions) Management issues, increasing invasion to privacy by companies like MS spying on computers through their automatic updates
• understanding the importance, history and dynamics of the battle over software rights - proprietary, free (Richard Stallman), open source (Eric Raymond) - many blogs and books, eg. Benkler's The Wealth of Networks, are now being devoted to this topic
• You don't have to be a software hacker to get involved. Publish your own work under the Creative Commons license scheme, developed by Lessig and others.
• DIY by using linux and free software, it is becoming more user friendly all the time. I have recently installed Ubuntu linux on a second computer and it was relatively hassle free process. btw see my blog about Mark Shuttleworth, amazing biography!
• join the FSF
• join the pirate party of your country. I have joined the Australian pirate party, which is ridiculously small but which is based on the Swedish pirate party which gained 34,918 votes, or 0.63% of the popular vote in their September 2006 elections - they needed 4% to get someone elected

Raise awareness, get involved, support those who are battling for the rights of free software.