What's Canonical thinking about Bazaar?

[Karl Fogel]

"Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn" <zooko at zooko.com> writes:
> 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.

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that the work involved was the only
reason.  Strategic reasons were important too, and I agree with you
there's nothing wrong with that.

But...

> 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

...I find this whole discussion odd.  Bazaar is licensed under a free
software license.  Canonical can't suddenly make all copies in the world
proprietary.  What exactly is the worry here?  I always thought one of
the best things about these licenses is that you don't have to worry
about people's or organizations intentions so much anymore, because they
can't do things with your copies anyway -- they can only do things with
their copies.

In theory, Canonical, being the copyright holder, could relicense a fork
of Bazaar under a proprietary license.  The probability of success or
failure of such a fork doesn't matter here: the free line of development
wouldn't go away.  I worked for six years on software (Subversion) whose
license allowed anyone to make a proprietary fork at any time.  It never
worried me in the slightest, and Subversion is still free.

I agree with Martin: "The thing [that] 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."

Bazaar's license relieves you of the need to worry about Canonical's
intentions.  But if you _did_ want to worry about them, the example of
Launchpad ought to be relevant.

-K