Ironically, Ken Schwaber has made a lot of money off of "Agile" the product. Becoming a "Certified Scrum Master" will cost you about $1k. You get that by taking a class with a "Certified Scrum Trainer" who spends quite a bit per year (payable to The Scrum Alliance) to keep that certification. On my planet, we call this a "pyramid scheme". I understand that this is an ad hominem attack; nevertheless, when talking "agile" (either big A or little a) with the Scrum dudes, one would do well to consider the source.

  A pyramid scheme is a non-sustainable business model that involves promising
  participants payment, services or ideals, primarily for enrolling other people
  into the scheme or training them to take part, rather than supplying any real
  investment or sale of products or services to the public.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_scheme

It's absolutely true that Ken makes money recruiting people to use Scrum, and he has in turn anointed other trainers to teach Scrum and they make their money recruiting people to use Scrum. However, the vast, vast majority of the people who have taken Scrum courses use them to ship software, either directly as employees or indirectly as consultants. Scrum is not a pyramid scheme.

Now let's talk about whether Ken sells a product. Of course he does!!!! Ken sells training, and it is perfectly valid to say that his training is a product as are his books. But that is not the same thing as saying that Scrum itself is a product. You can't just buy the training and expect results. Scrum Training != Scrum.

This is trivially true. Let's compare to programming. I have a Java programming team. I can "buy" the Ruby product, but to experience change, I have to embrace the Ruby Way, and that goes beyond simply installing the Ruby interpreter. Ruby the interpreter is a product, the Ruby Way is not a product (love it or hate it, I'm sure you agree).

(Just so you know, I'm a "Scrum dude" myself.)

What sounds fishy is that the Scrum Trainer has to keep paying money to keep his certification.

Certifications are a joke when it comes to programming anyway, much less when it comes to programming methodologies. What if someone came up to you and told you that they are a certified Ruby Way Master?

Yet it seems like certification matters to some people (otherwise there would be no point in paying someone money to retain it). And it's obviously in the interest of the Scrum Alliance to make people believe that it matters because it lets them sell it over and over again to the Scrum Trainers. So it seems like they build their hierarchy to put themselves in a position where they profit from the lie that certification matters.

Moreover, they also added another couple of layers of people who also want people to believe that certification matters (Trainers and Masters because they want to make back the money they paid for their cert). While this is not exactly a pyramid scheme, there are some similarities in that money gets passed up and people are trying to convince everyone of a lie.

I think certifications might make sense for things where it is impossible for other people to tell whether someone knows their stuff. I don't think Agile is that hard conceptually.

I also think re-certification makes sense in an area where the state of the art is constantly advancing, so that if someone is certified you know that they are really up to date with the latest developments. I don't think Agile changes that much.

I'm troubled by certification as well, although that is somewhat orthogonal to whether I value Ken's training... I personally took the training to improve myself. The "certification" didn't mean much to me one way or the other.

In fact, I would tie it back to what I said above and suggets that the certificate is a product just as a the training is a product, but the certificate is not the training and the training is not the practice. If the training is one step removed from Scrum, the certificate is two steps removed from Scrum!

This. Pyramid schemes are necessarily unsustainable, because everyone who gets involved is solely relying on a windfall for getting still more people involved, and while the world is overbreeding, it's not at the rate they need. As soon as you find end users who will see some kind of net value even after growth stops, you have something that can sustain itself indefinitely. At worst it could be a bubble of investment in training capacity, if they overshot the market size.