Scratch

Scratch isn't about making money, it's free.

okay, I still don't like the money idea, but the rest I agree with.

Personally I can understand the wish of many Scratchers to be able to deliver their projects as a packaged stand-alone executable, like a "real" application. And I don't believe that the wish for a stand-alone executable per se excludes the open-source principle.

When I was still programming for OS/2 there used to be an interpreted script language called Rexx, which would only run in a terminal window, and a cool little tool that let you assemble a presentation manger GUI controlled by Rexx scripts. The cool part was that you could save the GUI-app as .exe, embedding the scripts as resource strings, and that afterwards you could open the .exe file in the GUI-tool and edit the scripts again.

Smalltalk/V worked in a similar way: You would save all of your code (the Smalltalk-image) into an .exe file, which you could distribute to clients, and edit in the IDE.

The easiest way would be to strip the Scratch source code of the IDE code and mod it into just a Scratch player (which could run in a much smaller window, just the size of the stage plus the green flag and the stop button), and to allow saving the image to a new file when a Scratch project is opened. But the deliverable image file would still be very big (about 5-6 MB's), and a bit of an overkill for just delivering a single Scratch project.

But I guess if somebody did a native Scratch-interpreter for Windows in something like C (i.e. resulting in a reasonable small file size), this could be used as an .exe stub to which a Scratch project could be added as resource. That way it should even be possible to open such stand-alone exe's in Scratch...

Now, hands-up, please, who's volunteering for the "native-Scratch-interpreter-for-Windows-done-in-something-like-C" part? 

Kevin, of course it's basically the same, and I'm not saying it's needed at all. In fact, I'm perfectly content with the way Scratch is currently distributed. But there just seems to be such a great demand to be able to share "real" .exe files among Scratch programmers that I was fantasizing about ways to accomplish that without sacrifycing the open-source feature of Scratch. My impression is, that if Scratch projects could be saved as .exe files, Scratch usage would probably skyrocket. So it might actually be worthwile to investigate into this a little, just because there seems to be such a big - even though somewhat irrational - demand.

Yeah, we need to be able to save our projects in .exe format

You just bumped a 2 year old topic.
I think that Jens made a Scratch2Exe compiler, so that they can be standalone programs.