Scratch-projects is now relicensed

[DNin01]

It's time for a new license

From now on, the contents of this repository will default to being licensed under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY 4.0).

Why this change?

In the past, I applied a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license to this repository because it was the same license Scratch automatically applied to all user-generated content shared on Scratch. The problems with that license are that:

1. It's two major versions behind
2. It requires that derivative works be licensed under the same terms

In Scratch, this is mostly not a huge deal, particularly because everything is under that license, but on other platforms like GitHub, you are responsible for choosing the license terms you want to apply to your code and content, and therefore you aren't limited to just sharing content under CC-BY-SA 2.0 license terms. But the ShareAlike clause removes some flexibility by, simply put, requiring derivative works to also use CC-BY-SA, and to my understanding, may require the entire package to use that license as well. This is especially a big deal in existing repositories of Scratch project source files where you may already be using an incompatible license and don't want to change it up, or if the licenses of two or more different works conflict. 🤷

Don't get me wrong, sometimes you want to use CC-BY-SA, it just isn't always the best choice, like for libraries and frameworks. Remember, some of the Scratch projects in this repository contain material meant to be reused by people like you, so the license terms need to be flexible enough for that to work out well.

That's why I'm changing the license. Under the terms of CC-BY 4.0, you can now use content from this repository in your work without the worry of licensing your work under compatible license terms, just so long as you follow its license terms. 🎉

Also note that this change will not affect everything in the repository - at the time of posting this, there is one project, Drag Across Windows, that still uses a CC-BY-SA 2.0 license (excluding its code), and I may make more projects under other licenses in the future, so always double-check! 👀

And to be really complete, yes, the license terms also apply to other components of the repository like the README and .github directory.

Getting up to date

For existing users of this content, the new license terms apply starting from the moment of the relicense, which is how it is now at the time of posting this. In other words, only starting from the current state of the repository and going forward does the new license apply, so if you're already using anything, you'll need to update to the latest version and then you can use it under the new license terms. If I understand correctly, CC-BY 4.0 is only more permissive than CC-BY-SA 2.0, so you shouldn't lose any rights. 👏

Learn more

To learn more about this change, refer to License and giving credit on the main README.