I’ve wanted to attend some specific Scrum training or send some of my people to it for a while now, but for the last year and a half I’ve always been put off by this little item on the Control Chaos site:
The Individual License of the Scrum Product is only granted to ScrumMasters that have met the requirements of a ScrumMaster, as specified by the current ScrumMaster Certification program defined at CertifiedScrum.
The individual has the right to use the Scrum Product as provided in the performance of their professional work. The individual may use the Scrum Product to train others and describe Scrum to others. The individual is responsible for not letting the Scrum Product be used by other individuals or organizations unless they have acquired either an Individual or Organizational license, as provided.
So it appears that if I send say one of my developers to any of the certified training that they come back and use Scrum as they learned it and our organization has to pay for an actual license. This feels a whole lot like the pain of RUP and their attempt at licensing a methodology. Or I have the option of reading some books, attending a few conferences, and experimenting with Scrum and pay nothing. Considering the whole appeal of Agile often dovetails with the open source movement I really don’t get the approach.
Then I read that in a Financial Times of London article that Ken Schwaber contradicts this with the following statement
Mr Schwaber says 2,000 people are trained to run the Scrum process – so-called scrum-masters – but he has no idea how widespread its use is, and he is determined not to turn it into a product. “It’s free,” he says. “Once you commercialise it, all you think about is making money from it.” — July 27th 2005
So am I missing something here and I don’t have to pay for licensing Scrum if I send a developer to training?