What's Canonical thinking about Bazaar?

[Martin Pool]

2009/11/13 Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn <zooko at zooko.com>:

>>  * 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?

There are not, afaik, any conditions that you can't write your own
implementation of the protocol or that you can't use the client
against them, and the client is not obfuscated.  That's the sort of
thing I meant, though perhaps this point was too vague.

Anyhow: Personally I don't have a problem with UbuntuOne as a piece of
free software that only talks to something that's non-free software.
Similar categories are: Facebook clients, printer drivers, wlan
drivers, ipmi clients, iPod managers, Palm sync software.  I have used
several and written some.

I don't think the fact that the authors of the free software are paid
by the same people as the owners of the non-released service makes the
free software less free.  I don't think releasing one piece of free
software creates a moral obligation to release all related software.

I'm fine if people don't want to use services run by others, or don't
want to use them for critical data, or don't want to use services
unless they have a copy of all of the code for those services.  Those
are entirely understandable.  Obviously many free software
contributors do otherwise.  I think it's really a matter of where you
draw the line - presumably all of us are traversing non-free-software
core routers to talk about this.

> 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.

If the worst you can say about Canonical is that sometimes business
reasons lead us to release software later rather than sooner then I'm
ok with that.  Business reasons also mean that some things never get
written at all.

The thing I think is good about Launchpad is that we had no obligation
to ever release it, but we did, even though it was a tough decision
and a lot of hard work to do it, and many people thought we wouldn't
actually do it.  Not only was it released but it turned into a viable
open source project with non-employee people sending real patches,
getting them merged, and taking the lead on new features.

> 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.

No, I think the thread has just been confused, not the people.
Launchpad was not released from day one because we wanted a single
"canonical" database, not a clutter of separate bug trackers - that's
the problem it's trying to solve.  (Interesting question whether it
would have been better to build in federation from the start, but
definitely off topic.)  But from the date the promise to release was
made, it pretty much was a lot of hard work by Karl and others to meet
the deadline.

-- 
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>