China bans Scratch, MIT’s programming language for kids

Banning a kids' programming language because it mentions Taiwan? The PRC are truly pathetic.

Not familiar with Scratch or this issue so paid a visit to their website and searched for 'hongkong'.

Just on the first results page there are several extremely political apps and comments.

I am not sure Scratch is an appropriate platform for this sort of content. But in any case it's pretty clear that a lot of it will be seen as unacceptable by Chinese authorities. The usual remedy for this sort of 'situation' is to block the whole site, as they have just done. I don't think this will be temporary.

Censorship is ridiculous. Given the current political climate, the chinese government can't really do much to the U.S. (as it knows it's no match), small retorts like these are their way to signal discomfort. Plus they've had a long infamous history of doing exactly this with U.S. based software, so it comes as no surprise.

Is there any news on how well China follows GPL licenses? There's a lot of patent issues in the physical world, but I'm curious how all of this open source code will fare.