new Bazaar homepage URL

[Ben Finney]

Algis Kabaila <akabaila at pcug.org.au> writes:

> Bazaar is an open source project that has attracted a great deal of
> community support. As a member(*) of the community, I applaud
> Canonical for its support of an open source project under a GPL
> licence. The licence is held by the Canonical.

All agreed so far; you're not saying anything here that is controversial
AFAICT.

> If Canonical can rightfully license Bazaar, why should they not choose
> where to display its website and open documentation?

They should choose, but choices have consequences.

A quite predictable consequence of hosting Bazaar at a subdomain within
‘canonical.com’ is that the public perception of the project will shift
even more in the “if we use Bazaar we are tying ourselves to the
Canonical corporation” direction.

> I don't see anything in this proposal that anyone could seriously
> object to.

I, as someone who tries to evangelise Bazaar to free-software projects
and vendor-depedency-sensitive organisations, object to unduly tying
Bazaar the project to Canonical the corporation.

It makes the job significantly more difficult to convince such people to
commit their work to a tool when it is bound by such a perception.
Especially when there is an alternative, Mercurial, that is almost
identical (in an outsider's first approximation) but also free of this
unnecessary association.

> Sure, Martin could have worded this a little more inclusively, but
> what the heck. Isn't the overall result just great, when Open Source
> project is supported by a commercial entity?

As has already been pointed out Canonical's *support for* the project is
quite orthogonal from the URL used for hosting it. There's very little
extra burden to simply keep the existing ‘bazaar-vcs.org’ domain, and a
lot of good perception to be lost by changing it.

-- 
 \          “If I ever get real rich, I hope I'm not real mean to poor |
  `\                              people, like I am now.” —Jack Handey |
_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney