What's Canonical thinking about Bazaar?

[Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn]

On Friday, 2009-11-06, at 0:31, Martin Pool wrote:

> Confidence that the project will remain open, and not have its  
> energy dissipated by a proprietary fork is crucial.
>
> We (Canonical) won't take Bazaar proprietary.  Making it a GNU  
> project is part of giving confidence in that.  If there are more  
> things we could do, we should talk about it - we are looking at  
> making the language in the copyright agreement more clear in this  
> regard.

For example the copyright agreement could obligate Canonical to GPL  
all future versions of bzr?

> Canonical released Launchpad's source, completely and ahead of  
> schedule.  I feel that shows some kind of good faith.

Ah, actually the way I and most people that I've talked to perceive  
it is that Canonical kept Launchpad's source closed for a long time,  
which shows some kind of bad faith.  I also believe that Canonical  
did that at least in part for strategic reasons (to make sure there  
weren't mini-launchpads trying to steal the thunder of launchpad.net)  
and not just for the typical "open sourcing stuff is hard and takes a  
long time to finish" reasons.

Sorry, but that's (a) what I'm hereby alleging about your company's  
past and (b) what most people I've talked to also assume about the  
situation.

Anyway, maybe you shouldn't bring up launchpad when you're arguing  
that Canonical is full of good faith.  ;-)


Thanks for your work, which I believe to be in good faith, on bzr,  
Martin.

Regards,

Zooko