Bzr development stopped

[Ben Finney]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen at xemacs.org> writes:

> Ben Finney writes:
>
>  > One of the biggest points holding back development is the barrier
>  > of a one-sided contribution agreement.
>
> I really don't believe that. It would be easy enough to prove though:
> Fork! If it's really a big barrier to development, you'll get a huge
> round of applause and a deluge of code contributions.

Not an effective test. The pool of potential contributors to Bazaar is
now small enough that splitting the pool would not likely succeed, even
if I'm right.

> I don't think you will, though. Bazaar, while it is the preferred VCS
> of some highly skilled hackers, is basically a product aimed at people
> who either can't or won't put thought into their VCS. They'd rather
> switch than hack, and in order to keep satisfaction levels high,
> Canonical pays salaries to a number of the primary contributors.

I have no quarrel with primary contributors being paid. That can be done
just as well with all contributions being under the GPL for *all*
parties, including Canonical.

>  > It's great to have Bazaar under the GPL, ensuring further
>  > redistribution is always under the GPL. But Canonical is not
>  > content with equal treatment and insists code contributors give
>  > them special rights to relicense under non-free terms
>
> I suspect that if you ask the legal beagles, Canonical does not
> request those rights to permit release of a proprietary Canonical
> products. Rather, they want to be free to mix any software they
> develop into improvements of proprietary software already in use by
> their consulting clients (ie, without triggering the GPL on 3rd-party
> code).

Which is covered by what I said.

>  > I dearly hope Canonical can be convinced – ideally by its
>  > developers and employees – to release its contributors from the
>  > agreement
>
> That would be nice, and probably smart in the long run.

Amen to that.

-- 
 \     “Try adding “as long as you don't breach the terms of service – |
  `\          according to our sole judgement” to the end of any cloud |
_o__)                      computing pitch.” —Simon Phipps, 2010-12-11 |
Ben Finney