What's Canonical thinking about Bazaar?

[Ben Finney]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen at xemacs.org> writes:

> But you're missing Ian's point about *some* people (fairly highly
> correlated with the kind of people who actually spend money on
> software) who feel more secure if there's a corporation behind the
> software. We've had one person *explicitly* testify to that already.
>
> That's why I've identified the people who react as you describe as
> "Ben's and my acquaintances, among others".  They *are* a significant
> fraction of the people I hang out with.  But I suspect that among the
> paying customers, the reaction is going to be "somebody's paying
> developers to maintain this but I can have it for free?  Cool!"

I don't think I am missing the point: I've acknowledged, several times
in this thread, that it's *great* Canonical are behind Bazaar and are
paying developers to improve and maintain it. I want that practice to be
acknowledged and lauded and encouraged, and I want people to be
reassured by that fact when they see it.

But everybody *knows* Bazaar is supported by Canonical, the same way
everybody knows OpenOffice is backed by Sun. I don't see the above as
any justification for further emphasising Canonical to the detriment of
Bazaar's image as a community project, a GNU project even.

Examples of “corporate backing” and “community project” in concert have
already been given in this thread; I believe it was you who mentioned
them: OpenOffice, GNOME, Mercurial even. It's demonstrably not necessary
to *lose* the “Bazaar has corporate backing” benefits you speak of in
order to promote Bazaar as a community project — but further emphasising
the “corporate backing” focus *does* detract from its image as a
community project, as you pointed out.

If it's a fact that Bazaar *is* a community project, a GNU project, then
please let's not allow that to be diminished in public perception.

-- 
 \       “… one of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was |
  `\        that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful |
_o__)                  termination of their C programs.” —Robert Firth |
Ben Finney