Code written by the wrong people (was: Shipping plugins)

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 8:52 PM, Ben Finney <ben+bazaar at benfinney.id.au> wrote:

> Please, Bazaar developers, convince Canonical that your project is being
> hurt by this silliness, and move to the “inbound == outbound” copyright
> policy of the vast majority of successful free-software projects
> <URL:https://lwn.net/Articles/414051/>.

That's a *terrible* reason for do anything.  "If  two million penguins
do a stupid thing, it is still a stupid thing."  Most free software
projects, successful or not, (a) simply are not mission-critical to
anybody, and (b) simply do not want to deal with legal issues and
generally try to pretend that they'll go away if ignored (even in the
case of XEmacs, which is downstream of the most rigidly policed legal
policies in free software).

Whether this particular change is stupid, of course, is going to be up
to the judgment of the Canonical legal staff.

The right reason for making this change is that optional plugins are,
well, optional plugins, the core runs perfectly well without them, and
the direction of derivation and therefore the legal issues are thus
separable from the core.  That argument might even carry some weight
with Mark and the Canonical leagle beagles.

Regards,
Steve