What's Canonical thinking about Bazaar?

[Eugene Wee]

Hi,

On Sat, Nov 14, 2009 at 1:52 PM, Karl Fogel <karl.fogel at canonical.com> wrote:
> ...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.

Perhaps the worry is that Canonical, being the copyright holder, can
indeed suddenly make all copies of Bazaar in the world proprietary. It
appears that some experts have argued on this possibility in the past,
as claimed here:
http://lwn.net/Articles/347236/
though on that same page is an assertion that precedent has been
established in US law such that the expert opinion is outdated. On the
other hand, it may be the case that this could be the problem in other
jurisdictions, e.g., I have no idea of what the law is on this point
in Singapore.

Regards,
Eugene