What's Canonical thinking about Bazaar?

[Andrew Cowie]

On Mon, 2009-11-02 at 20:05 +1100, Martin Pool wrote:

>  * the rest of our time will continue to be driven by community
> feedback and building a great program in its own right

I'd like to continue to encourage the people who work hard on bzr to
really focus on the user experience and consistency in the user
interface. One of Bazaar's claims to fame is that it has a clean UI, but
we all know there are horror stories riddled throughout the tool and its
ecosystem.

The push on non-UI things leading up to 2.0 was in part justified by
saying "don't worry; post 2.0 we'll really be focusing on usability.
It'll be the UI cycle!". Martin's announcements certainly don't make it
sound like this will be all that important after all. That's
discouraging, to say the least.

Since polish like this is so often the stuff that tends not to get done
without help, I hope that a firm that invests resources in Bazaar might
choose to direct some of that effort towards UI work.

> There is a desire to position Bazaar more as "a Canonical open source
> product" rather than "an open source project supported by Canonical" -
> thus the request for the web site name change.

Consider that if you adopt the former approach you can bet your ass
you'll never get any other major corporate interests contributing the "a
Canonical open source product", whereas it is not unpalatable to
contribute significantly to "an open source project supported by {insert
list here}".

The difference between product and project is glaring here.

        [come to think of it, we've been standing on stages
        pontificating about the importance of this difference for well
        over a decade]

It's astonishing to think that the senior managers at Canonical don't
understand about this. I rather assume they do, which is why the
concerns Ben has expressed are so cogent.

Constellations like the GNOME Project aren't controlled by any one
corporate interest; it is hugely contributed to by many distros and
downstream product vendors. Certainly, those contributors have
significant say, but we've learned to collaborate, and a big part of
that is making other corporations and interests feel comfortable that
they are safe — and welcome — to use your work, and to in turn
contribute their own.

AfC
Sydney

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