Imagine that each Scratch project is a cake, a very special cake that comes with its recipe (programming blocks). All members of the Scratch community share their cakes along with their recipes. This means that you can enjoy the cakes and learn how to make them yourself!
There is no secret recipe, the instructions on how to make these cakes are open for anyone to use, reuse, modify and be the source of inspiration for new ideas... I mean cakes.
You can eat the cakes as well as copy other people's recipes to make your own, maybe with different ingredients? This freedom comes with only two, very simple, requirements, or let's call them suggestions:
Some people gave a name to these type of sharing, they call it Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License. There is a lot to learn about it, and there are always pros and cons of sharing this way. However, in the words of a wise man with a funny beard: "Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far as society is free to use the results" (Richard M. Stallman).
We are not enforcing this rules. We prefer to have a community that follows these rule because they make sense. We are designing new features in the site to encourage people to both share and to give credit to others for their accomplishments. For example, you might have noticed that you can always download the original blocks of any project on this site. And now, we are working on easier ways of giving credit to other people's work. In the meantime, please continue to mention in your project notes people who's projects contributed to your own!
For the more technically inclined: you might find it interesting that each Scratch project page comes with embedded RDF metadata that sets the license of the project as well as other properties. We actually based our RDF on the one Flickr uses but changed it so it represents the content as "InteractiveResource".
Learn more about the terms of use of this on-line community and the Creative Commons initiative.
Scratch Team
Lifelong Kindergarten Group
MIT Media Lab
