What's Canonical thinking about Bazaar?

[David Muir]

Also a long time observer, first time commenter on this thread.

I understand this whole discussion is in regards to the *perception* of 
Bazaar, so it's not about what Bazaar being a "Canonical product" might 
mean in the future. In essence there's no difference between it being a 
Canonical product or a Canonical supported product. In either case, the 
majority of devs are Canonical employees and Canonical essentially has 
the controlling share.

In other words, "supported by" and "product of" are exactly the same in 
regards to the running and development of the project.

Now that that's out of the way...

I understand where Ben is coming from, but I have to politely disagree 
that it will negatively impact adoption rates. Of course, I have no data 
to back this up, but I would venture a guess that for every developer 
who decides not to use Bazaar because it's a "Canonical product" there 
will be an equal share of developers that will choose it because it is a 
"Canonical product", with an even larger share using it because it's 
"DVCS for humans" ;-).

It's for similar reasons that I use Zend Framework (sorry, I'm a PHP 
user...) for a lot of stuff. Sure there are tons of other frameworks out 
there, but I have a certain level of trust with Zend.  Likewise with 
Bazaar, the main reason why I use it is precisely because it's a 
Canonical product (I'm an Ubuntu user so I again have a level of trust 
with Canonical).

It's also interesting to note that Ubuntu is currently the most popular 
Linux distro by a seemingly huge margin. I don't ever see any arguments 
about it having poor adoption due to a perception of it being a 
"Canonical product", so why Bazaar? In some ways, it's one thing that 
would make Bazaar different from the other DVCS's out there and set it 
apart.

Anywhoo... my 2 yen worth.

Cheers,
David




Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> Patrick Regan writes:
>
>  > I may be unique in this view, but I think you'd find that there are
>  > others who would think similarly (especially those who will NOT read
>  > this mailing list).
>
> This has been acknowledged by all concerned at this point.
>
>  > Most users are not religious. Even those who love and use Open Source.
>
> It's mostly not a question of religion.  The kind of user who is
> turned off from contributing by "corporate product" branding and one
> vendor's dominance of the development team is of disproportionate
> importance to an open source community.
>
> Also, Canonical has registered Bazaar as a GNU project, and has gotten
> one very high-profile "sale" (Emacs) *purely* on that basis, over the
> *vociferous* objections of several core developers (including a couple
> who were very active in the anti-BitKeeper movement on lkml) and very
> lukewarm support from the core, including the listed maintainers.
> "Corporate product" branding doesn't fit with my image of a GNU
> project.  I suppose you can call that religious.  It's certainly a
> political tightrope to walk.  RMS can be a hairy nuisance if he thinks
> he's been used or double-crossed, and it's never been clear to me how
> far his endorsement of corporate "ownership" of free software goes.
>
>