What's Canonical thinking about Bazaar?

[Algis Kabaila]

On Monday 02 November 2009 23:32:28 Ian Clatworthy wrote:
> Ben Finney wrote:
> > Martin Pool <mbp at canonical.com> writes:
> >> Canonical's desired focus for Bazaar development in the next six-month
> >> period is on things that help Ubuntu developers, in particular in
> >> helping them to get better interaction with upstreams and to ship
> >> fixes faster.
[..]
> >
> > I had hoped that Canonical, and the Bazaar core developers, would not
> > want that impression to increase; but this makes me suspect that
> > impression may be right.
>
> I really, *really* struggle with this FUD. Canonical is sponsoring
> Bazaar because we believe it has an important part to play in making
> open source development - and therefore Ubuntu development - much more
> efficient. Good tools don't exist in a vacuum - they exist to solve hard
> problems.
> [..]. 
>
> Ian C.

After reading the above and some follow up stuff, I would suggest *not to 
struggle* with this or any other FUD - it is not worth the effort. Your work in 
writing good software, documentation, good GUI as well as your help to users, 
both individual and corporate, is *much* more important!  

As a former openSUSE user, I remember the outcry when that suse-GmbH  was 
bought by Novell and when soon after acquiring suse, Novell made a deal with 
MS.  A deal that to say the least, cast doubt about the open source, free (as 
in beer) software nature of that distro.  And what was the result of that 
outcry?

Zero!  The loudest critics of this "merger with the enemy" continued to use 
the same distro.  Why?  Because  they liked using it! 

Personally, I had similar concerns when Trolltech was bought by Nokia.  The 
result of that?  Qt is more readily available for programming cross-platform 
than before (because of change of licence)! 

Information, including software, is a complex subject. The future lies neither 
with information that is totally 'free' nor with information that is totally 
'proprietary'.  Some form of cooperation between the two extremes is waiting 
to be invented and formalised.  

As an old man I look with interest to see where ubuntu - bazaar - canonical 
are heading to, FUD not withstanding.  

OldAl.

-- 
Algis Kabaila, MEngSc, PhD(Eng)
http://akabaila.pcug.org.au/StructuralAnalysis.pdf