Launchpad licensing

[nlindblad]

I'd love to hear a discussion about Launchpad with a big focus on it's licensing. Launchpad is developed to intergrate open source projects to save developers and users lots of work by giving bug tracking/translating a central platform. But the software powering it (Launchpda itself) is not libre/open source.

Although, the translations for a program made using Launchpad (Rosetta) is automatically licensed under the same license as the program.

I've heard devlopers mentioning that they don't think Launchpad is suiteable to develop as libre/open source software because the goals are so specific.

My opinion is that some projects won't join in simply because of this.

[Lovechild]

It seems very odd to me that Mark Shuttleworth who on all counts is a huge FOSS supporter decides to not open this vital piece of his Ubuntu puzzle.

[tonytiger]

Do we know why it hasn't been Freed?

[dylunio]

Hearing a debate on Launchpad would be cool, since I see it as a great tool to help people translate etc. but it's closed source is a problem for me, it reminds me or BitKeeper and the Linux kernel, and what might happen.

[Lovechild]

Do we know why it hasn't been Freed?

I asked on the Rosetta list once, and the answer was rather vague, I think they weren't ready to release the source yet but now that Ubuntu switched to Malone for bugs and have used Rosetta for translation I feel it's time for clear answers.

Mark and Jeff seem very happy to talk about how good the platform is but none of them mentions the eventual release of source.

[dsas]

The source will be released eventually, but at the moment it's all one monolithic web app and so can't be, I'm not sure why.

Also until some kind of launchpad to launchpad xmlrpc stuff is added I'd guess it won't be, as that would take away some of the point of launchpad.

There's also the fact that other people would setup their own launchpad instances, which would mean things would stay as they are now, browsing around 20 million different websites for bugs etc on seperate things.

[poofyhairguy]

I remember reading on distrowatch that the reason that its closed source for now is that Mark wants a way for Ubuntu to make some money to sustain itself.

From what I can tell, he wants big companies (Google anyone?) to make custom distros for their needs based on Ubuntu. To do that well they need Launchpad.

He promises he will open source it one day, probably after he lands the one big contract needed to keep Ubuntu going for a few years.

[Lovechild]

I remember reading on distrowatch that the reason that its closed source for now is that Mark wants a way for Ubuntu to make some money to sustain itself.

From what I can tell, he wants big companies (Google anyone?) to make custom distros for their needs based on Ubuntu. To do that well they need Launchpad.

He promises he will open source it one day, probably after he lands the one big contract needed to keep Ubuntu going for a few years.

Well then Mark should stop saying that open source is the way forward, he seems to want it both ways and be worshipped as a god when he attempts to. Either free it and he can continue in the manner he speaks publicly currently or eat an Aq pie.

If he means to make money this way he is deluted beyond any point of reasoning, it will never happen and he will never get any adoption of the system in the wider community with it behnd bars either. Hopefully people will realise this and build something similar hopefully based on rPath' rBuilder and Conary.

[mattl]

The response I got was basically, they could release it today, but what they want is for there to be one big Launchpad site, not every little project installing their own.

Of course, there's nothing to say that it isn't free software already, but they're not required to offer the source code to everyone, only the people they distribute binaries to, which is nobody of course, as it's a Zope 3 application and thus interpreted.. unless someone wants a bunch of .pyc files

[AZZ]

The last time I checked, the GPL only covered applications that were distributed. As stated, launchpad is a web service, not a program you install on your hard drive.

Are you going to stop using google because you don't have the google search engine source?

There was a thing about the AFFERO-gpl on the show, two years ago, I think, which deals with applications that run over a network. Is there really that big a demand for Launchpad to be under such a licence?

[Nightwish]

that will also be a proiminent (optional) feature of gplv3.
personally, i'm ambivalent about that, but i trust the FSF.

[Aq]

The last time I checked, the GPL only covered applications that were distributed. As stated, launchpad is a web service, not a program you install on your hard drive.

Are you going to stop using google because you don't have the google search engine source?

There was a thing about the AFFERO-gpl on the show, two years ago, I think, which deals with applications that run over a network. Is there really that big a demand for Launchpad to be under such a licence?

Note that we also talked about web applications not being open source a few episodes ago, too, in Season 3 episode 13.

Aq.

[QuantumG]

Do we know why it hasn't been Freed?

Read the FAQ.

https://launchpad.net/faq

Is Launchpad open source? Will it be?

Our goal is to release all of Launchpad as free software, though it will take some time (potentially, years) before that happens.

We are doing so in a piecemeal approach. Parts of Launchpad have already been released as free software where they would be particularly useful to other projects. And very few, if any, Launchpad modifications to upstream code are not immediately published to those upstream projects.

Launchpad is a large, monolithic, web application. We would be happy to release the code for the Registry, for example, which keeps track of all upstream products and their series and releases; however, that code will not run without the distribution management code, which is part of of the service that Canonical provides to other companies that make their own distributions.

If you are keen on seeing Launchpad components published as free software sooner, rather than later, and you have good Python and Zope3 skills, we are happy to provide code access and accept patches that use Zope 3's component architecture to factor out individual Launchpad applications and make it easier to release chunks of Launchpad. That is a lot of hard work, but it would make it possible to release the Registry, and the parts of Rosetta that are used for upstream translation.

[jaduncan]

As a Debian user it pains me to say it, but Ubuntu is quite fundamentally breaking some of the core principles of the FOSS movement with Launchpad. The stated reason that it is too monolithic to develop on is clearly somewhat of a fig leaf - openoffice.org was appallingly coded, and yet non-Sun people seem to manage to work on it. It just gives me pause when I consider that Redhat released the equally closed, equally monolithic Netscape Directory Server. I also note Redhat have never, ever had a piece of software they have not open sourced.

If I don't accept proprietary formats for my own files, why would I want to introduce a proprietary format requirement to my development process? It certainly means that Debian will never use it, and if there is two distros that could do with bug database compatibility, it would be Debian and Ubuntu.

Not open sourcing this==cutting off one of your main potential sources of bug reports and patches.

[neuro]

It's not solely because it's large and monolithic that it's not been open sourced, if you read the faq properly you'll see they don't want to open source the bits they can and leave it unusable.