What's Canonical thinking about Bazaar?

[Martin Pool]

2009/11/12 Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn <zooko at zooko.com>:
> On Friday, 2009-11-06, at 0:31, Martin Pool wrote:
>> 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?

That sort of thing.

>> 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 think this is true that many people feel this way, and it's
factually true that Launchpad existed for years before the main source
release.  But personally I find it a bit depressing: companies that
release a lot of free software are judged harshly for not releasing
everything immediately, while most of the people making the criticisms
have not themselves freely released everything they ever wrote.  It
seems like a double standard.

At any rate, me disliking it won't change it.  We will be judged,
fairly or not, by our actions, and whether we look like reliable
custodians of Bazaar.  I think some of the specific actions identified
in this thread, from the patch pilot to improving the contribution
agreement, will help with that.

-- 
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>