Bzr development stopped

[Brian de Alwis]

On 12-Sep-2012, at 1:44 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
>> | project resulted would have to have copyright held by Canonical. The
>> | stated reason was allowing proprietary feature extensions as part of
>> | their Launchpad strategy.
> 
> So what?  That's not the Canonical contributor agreement, which
> involves no transfer of copyright.

It is a consequence of the GPL which considers linking (such as with plugins) to invoke a derivative work.  By having ownership over bzr, Canonical can grant an alternative license to itself (and others) to allow linking to proprietary extensions without invoking the GPL.  It's one of the areas of incompatibility between the Eclipse Public License.

http://www.eclipse.org/legal/eplfaq.php#GPLCOMPATIBLE

IANAL etc etc

Brian.