Bazaar development future (was: Bzr development stopped)

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Ben Finney writes:

 > It is still free software under the GPL, though. Is there a
 > sufficient community of Bazaar users interested enough to fund
 > development under different stewardship?

I refuse to believe that there are *no* people in this community who
will code without being paid.  Among other things, some of the people
who are paid by Canonical might very well moonlight on the new
project, even if Canonical tenders its regrets about making it their
day job.

Perhaps more important than funding coding is getting a distribution
going, which is something that a volunteer could do with a startup
cost of maybe a day, and then a couple of hours a month (you don't
have to do everything that Canonical currently does, and you can
request that other low-effort volunteers do stuff you might find
distasteful, like Windows installers), and perhaps if you can actually
get Canonical's blessing as the "way forward" branch (might be
difficult if you don't sign the contributor agreement, but can't hurt
to ask), that would kickstart inclusion of your VCS-zilla (or whatever
you call it) in the experimental branches of major distros.  Here's
what the only person to actually reply to my inquiry about the
contributor agreement said about this:

      I personnally don't have patches, because the copyright
    assignment acts as a deterrent.  If it hadn't, I would have spent
    much more time and energy on helping <core-developer X> on
    <feature Y>.  As it is, since I cannot contribute code
    (technically I can, but it won't be accepted, so for all intents
    and purpose I can't), I could only work on contributing test
    cases, test results, ideas, scenarios of things that should work
    but don't, and so on.

and in a followup asked about contributing to a "community fork".

      I don't object to forking in principle.  But randomly scattered
    patches all over the ecosystem are hardly going to make a
    difference, they'll require maintenance (porting to new ABIs and
    so on), and they very probably won't be shipped by distros.  It's
    really a deterrent rather than a blocker, but unfortunately it's a
    really efficient deterrent.

 > Who's in? More importantly, whose well-funded employer is in?

*sigh*

It's-not-momentum-if-the-car-stops-when-the-gas-runs-out-ly y'rs,

Steve