What's Canonical thinking about Bazaar?

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Andrew Cowie writes:

 > Consider that if you adopt the former approach you can bet your ass
 > you'll never get any other major corporate interests contributing the "a
 > Canonical open source product",

"Never" is too strong.  Lucid Emacs did not have trouble negotiating
with Sun, Aladdin Ghostscript had excellent relations with many
printer and fax manufacturers, including some that had very strong
ties to Adobe.  I see no reason why "Canonical Open Bazaar" wouldn't
get support in terms of stuff like Eclipse plugins from the companies
that provide the product to be linked to Bazaar, as long as
Canonical's agenda is open and doesn't thrash to the inconvenience of
such outside interests.

 > [A] big part of that is making other corporations and interests
 > feel comfortable that they are safe -- and welcome -- to use your
 > work, and to in turn contribute their own.

Branding open source just changes the parameters for that.  The
balance will be different, but the big players will still play.  A
Bazaar more oriented to supporting Ubuntu might actually be *more*
attractive to other Linux distros rather than less, just as the
(presumably) even tighter integration with Launchpad would likely be
a little offputting to SourceForge, Berlios, and Savannah.

I think the real tension here is the "existing user community" vs. the
"Canonical 'customer'".  It doesn't particularly *worry* me -- bzr is
now a pretty mature product -- but I think it could be handled better
or worse.