What's Canonical thinking about Bazaar?

[Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn]

On Friday, 2009-11-13, at 1:27 , Martin Pool wrote:

>> 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.

Yeah.  In case it isn't clear by now, I consider Canonical to be made  
up of "good people" not of "bad people".  But, I consider certain  
other organizations to be a bit more likely to maintain the long-term  
open-source licensing of code which is under their copyright.  The  
history of the licensing of launchpad is one reason why I feel that  
way.  I hope this information helps in your attempt, which I support,  
to make bzr into a widely accepted and relied-upon open source  
project while also supporting Canonical's business needs.

By the way, I was wondering if you've considered going all the way  
and binding your (Canonical's) hands from the ability to do a  
licensing fork.  For example, you could irrevocably assign copyright  
to FSF, leaving yourself with only GPL-granted permissions to bzr.

If I were you I think I wouldn't do that because I would want to  
retain the option of proprietary licensing in case it turns out to be  
profitable, but I'm curious what you think.

Regards,

Zooko