What's Canonical thinking about Bazaar?

[Philippe Lhoste]

On 14/11/2009 06:52, Karl Fogel wrote:
> 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.

Then there are patents. A silly thing, but that exists, alas.
See the sad Gif story...

Another thing is that if a company behind a software stops to support it 
(or the free version), it might stop development on the software (if 
nobody has interest, time, competence, etc. to maintain it) or can slow 
it down a lot.
Not a major problem is the software is mature enough (even though I 
appreciate improvements, Bzr is quite usable in the current state, for 
example).

Funnily, we also have the reverse scenario, when a well known company 
choose the open their software. See for example JetBrains with their 
IntelliJ IDEA software. Or Netscape opening their browser. Resulting in 
Firefox... after a major rewriting because codebase was quite poor (IIRC)!

These are quite theoretical views, not necessarily applying to 
Bazaar/Canonical! :-)

-- 
Philippe Lhoste
--  (near) Paris -- France
--  http://Phi.Lho.free.fr
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