Hi Debian legal,

I work for the research group at MIT that develops and maintains
Scratch. Scratch is a programming language that makes it easy for kids to
create their own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art --
and share their creations on the web.

I'm working on getting the rest of the Scratch Team to sign off on releasing
Scratch 1.4 under the GPL v3. One roadblock that remains is that we feel
it's important to prevent others from re-releasing modified versions of
Scratch with our trademarks. We *do not* want to prevent maintainers or
helpful contributors from fixing bugs or addressing security issues in the
official Scratch package. And we're happy to see Scratch remixed as long as
the remix isn't called Scratch, and doesn't use our logo or the Scratch Cat
(this has been done many times
already<http://wiki.scratch.mit.edu/wiki/List_of_Scratch_Modifications>
under
our current custom license).

Are there good legal strategies for providing these protections that you'd
recommend we look into? We'd very much like Scratch to be included in
Debian's repositories, as well as other distros.

Thanks -
Amos Blanton
Scratch Community Coordinator
scratch.mit.edu

-- 
_____
Amos

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