Launchpad licensing

[jaduncan]

Mmm. I guess I should clarify this. The only other reason they can't release Launchpad is because it depends on software that is propriatory (all the stuff they want to sell to other distros), since otherwise there is *no need* to seperate out elements and it would just be a monolithic package. It's not like the software yould break as a whole were it at a different domain name, or with differently named admin accounts. So. We have "we are going to free it at some point" sofware combined with utterly propriatory software.

As a free software guy, what is there to love? As a more reasonable view, it's fine to have propriatory software, but you shouldn't claim you are about freedom in that case.

Does this now make more sense?

[Lovechild]

While I absolutely refuse to use propriatary software on my machine, as a translator my experience with Launchpad is that in the past 48 hours I have done and tested more work than I did by hand the past 3 months. It's an excellent tool.

I would be sad if I was unable to contribute to the FLOSS community as effectively as possible and Launchpad is for better or worse heavily linked to Ubuntu and it is non-free - I want to help work on Rosetta and I want Launchpad to get wider adoption as it's an excellence tool, the fact is that it won't get adopted so long as it's non-free.

[AndyBo]

Let's not forget that Launchpad is a separate product from the Ubuntu distro.

From the Ubuntu philosophy page

Ubuntu is a community driven project to create an operating system and a full set of applications using free and open source software.

If I have this right, then Launchpad is the tool that is enabling Ubuntu to provide an OS in more languages than any other OS that is currently available, and to automatically feed those changes upstream. Bug fixes through Malone within Launchpad get fed upstream as well.

And as Lovechild just said, it reduces the barrier to entry for contributing to open source. That can only be a good thing.

My pragmatic opinion is "So what if Launchpad is proprietary? It is helping us to improve the overall FLOSS eco-system, and if it brings Canonical some cash flow, then that is also a Good Thing."

And, after all, how many of us would want or need to host a Launchpad system of our own? I can only think that large corporations would need this kind of system for large scale development projects, so let them pay for the privilege. The money made will help to improve what has to the one of the, if not the, best Linux distros that is available right now.

On the "Red Hat releases all of their code" point, then my reply will be "and Ubuntu make all their OS patches available free of charge, with no messing around".

Seriously - have you tried to keep a RHEL installation up to date without a current Red Hat Network license? When I come across that situation then there is usually a short discussion followed by a migration to CentOS...

just my 0.02

[mrben]

On the "Red Hat releases all of their code" point, then my reply will be "and Ubuntu make all their OS patches available free of charge, with no messing around".

Seriously - have you tried to keep a RHEL installation up to date without a current Red Hat Network license? When I come across that situation then there is usually a short discussion followed by a migration to CentOS...

These are very different circumstances - Red Hat are providing GPL software, but are charging for a service, which they are perfectly entitled to do in a Free world.

However, I come back to the question I always have with Launchpad - are Canonical distributing it? If they're not distributing it, then whether or not it is proprietary becomes a null point, as even if it was GPL they would not be under any compulsion to release the source if they were not distributing it.

[neuro]

afaik canonical don't distribute launchpad as a package or product. Red Hat use an Oracle-based system to handle RHEL support requests, should they free all that code behind that system? Not if they don't want to, and there's no reason they should. This again makes me wary of people who cry that all software everywhere should be free and open - it's not always in everyone's best interest