What's Canonical thinking about Bazaar?

[Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn]

On Wednesday, 2009-11-11, at 23:18 , Martin Pool wrote:

> Then I think "bad faith" was a pretty strange term to choose.

I guess I didn't understand what you meant by "good faith" when you  
said that the open sourcing of launchpad demonstrated it, and so by  
reversing it to "bad faith" I said something that I hadn't meant -- I  
implied that Canonical was being dishonest.

I don't want to repeat myself, but I do need to walk through this one  
more time, because having stuck my foot in my mouth like that at the  
start has made it difficult to enunciate a certain subtlety.

1.  Canonical delayed the open-sourcing of launchpad in part for  
strategic reasons, not just because it was hard and it took a long  
time.  I have this on personal communication from Steve Alexander,  
who was the founder of launchpad (IIUC) and was the person  
authoritative over it within Canonical during the period in  
question.  He told me in personal conversation in May of this year  
that he chose to keep it proprietary at first in order to ensure that  
there would be only one, central, launchpad at first.

2.  And that's fine!  There is nothing wrong with keeping the source  
code of your web service proprietary for strategic reasons, and there  
is certainly nothin wrong with keeping it proprietary at first, while  
promising to open source it, and then keeping your promise.

3.  But, that makes launchpad an odd choice for an argument that  
Canonical can be relied upon by an open source community to cultivate  
the long-term openness of bzr.  The example of launchpad is, to me, a  
demonstration that Canonical has business needs and that these  
business needs may take precedence over their preference for open  
sourcing their work.  This is why I raised my objection in the first  
place -- Martin Pool cited Canonical's stewardship of the open-source  
launchpad as an example of why people would be willing to trust  
Canonical to keep bzr fully open.  I find that an odd choice of  
example -- it seems closer to a counter-example to me.

4.  The way Canonical handled the licensing of launchpad is fine and  
moral, but of course only as long as they are honest about it.  It  
sounds like some of the Canonical employees on this list may think  
that the reason that launchpad was closed-source for so long was  
solely or mostly because it is hard work to release open source  
software.  It is hard work, and I wouldn't be surprised if that was  
part of the reason, but for future reference I hope everyone remains  
aware of the strategic reason and is careful not to mislead people  
about it.

I'm sorry if my contribution to this thread has been disruptive or  
divisive.  It was and is my intention to help.

>  * the software we ship is really genuinely in-practice free under  
> its licence with no special extra conditions

Could you clarify if you think this principle applies to UbuntuOne?   
If I understand correctly, UbuntuOne is a combination of an open  
source client, an undocumented and non-standard protocol, and a  
closed-source server.  Please correct me if I'm wrong.  This seems  
somewhat at odds with the laudable principle of "really genuinely in- 
practice free".  The relevance of this to this current conversation  
is that Canonical's handling of UbuntuOne licensing,  
interoperability, etc., is another factor that people may consider  
when deciding whether to bet on the long-term openness of bzr.

And let me hasten to add that I don't think it is inherently immoral  
or dishonest to sell people access to your proprietary server.

Regards,

Zooko
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