What's Canonical thinking about Bazaar?

[Martin Pool]

A bit of an update on recent management conversations at Canonical about Bazaar:

In a nutshell:
  * the 'strategic' or 'long-term' portion of our work is going to
focus on Ubuntu stories, to be more precisely determined in the next
few weeks.
 * the rest of our time will continue to be driven by community
feedback and building a great program in its own right

We get good and positive feedback from Bazaar users.  We think Bazaar
has a lot to add to the open source community, and can do a lot to
help with Ubuntu development, and Canonical will keep funding
development.

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.  This focus means that Bazaar needs to both prioritize
their bugs and to do larger forward development for Ubuntu.  Launchpad
will be taking a similar tack (see
<http://blog.launchpad.net/general/launchpad-the-next-six-months> for
more information).

James Westby, Jono Lange, and others have been doing good work
(<https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2009-July/028541.html>,
<https://wiki.edubuntu.org/DistributedDevelopment>) on getting all
Ubuntu source into package branches.  From Canonical's point of view,
anything which helps with that switchover is a good thing to support.
Andrew will send a separate mail with more details on that.

Although there is a focus in what we'll be spending our work time on,
I do not want it to be an excessively tight focus.  It's still
important to be responsive to bug reports and patches from
non-Canonical people, to do regular quality releases, to look at the
big picture of documentation and plugins, and to allow room for
developers to do what they think makes for a great product.  Also,
obviously Canonical doesn't control all work on Bazaar and we will be
open to patches and suggestions from others.

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.  I'm not sure if that's
the right way to describe the change in approach - it's close, though,
and I'm trying to work out just precisely what it is.

We have sold support and conversion contracts for Bazaar and plan to
sell more, and to reinvest the revenue in Bazaar development.  We
won't be adding full-time developers in the foreseeable future (say
the next few months) but we are interested in letting contracts.

-- 
Martin