Canonical Begins To Open-Source Launchpad

kripkenstein writes "Canonical, the corporation behind Ubuntu, has begun to open-source Launchpad. Canonical has been criticized for not doing so earlier. The first component of Launchpad to be open-sourced is Storm, described as an 'object-relational mapper for Python.' A tutorial with many examples is available. The license for Storm is the LGPL 2.1. Inspection of the source files shows they contain the common phrase, 'either version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later version,' meaning that Storm is LGPLv3-compatible."

Comments

It's Always a Choice

[eldavojohn]

Canonical, the corporation behind Ubuntu, has begun to open-source Launchpad. Canonical has been criticized for not doing so earlier. I wish people would relax and remember that everyone has the choice to release their software under whatever license they deem acceptable.

Now, you might be wondering why anyone would open source anything at all. And my simple answer to that is this: Prior to today, if someone said 'Launchpad' to me, it would be the Ducktales character. As soon as this application is open source, it's going to become something I installed on my box and played around with for a while. And that's the difference, if it's proprietary, you better be prepared to sell it or it's going to die a death of obscurity without anyone even hearing about it.

People have the choice not to open source software and oftentimes, it's for very good reasons. I don't think this case is any different as the Wikipedia article states:

Mark Shuttleworth responded personally to this criticism stating that Launchpad needs paid-programmers to continue the development of the Launchpad platform and that there would be no point in developing multiple versions of Launchpad due to the probable incomparability of the forks [2]. Mod me as flamebait if you want but the original creators deciding that they value the quality or single source of code is just as valid as any other for delaying a release under an open source license.

Canonical isn't stupid and, yes, they're making money. According to Wikipedia, their 50 person company has an annual revenue of $10 million. Which isn't too shabby. I think these guys are genuinely interested in being both an active member of the open source (Ubunutu) and commercial (Project Landscape) worlds. Isn't it obvious who their thinking of when they put:

'either version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later version,' which is pretty much proof that they have companies in mind who refuse to proceed to GPLv3 (like Microsoft and the cadre of companies that have paid them for software patent protection). You can paint this move as evil, brilliant, successful, intelligent or any of all of them. To me, I trust these guys as Ubuntu has made open source a little more accessible to the world and I really believe that not only do they know what they're doing but they're going to be around for a while. That's good news for software and (at least in my opinion) therefor good news for everyone.

Re:It's Always a Choice

[physicsnick]

As soon as this application is open source, it's going to become something I installed on my box and played around with for a while. I don't think you understand what Launchpad is.

Part of the reason Canonical was in no hurry to ready Launchpad for open source was that it wasn't really meant to be hosted on a variety of different servers or instanced for each project, like Trac; it's a centralized system designed to host many projects concurrently, like SourceForge. In short, there was only supposed to be one Launchpad.

The fact that people wanted Launchpad open source to host their own projects meant that Canonical first had to design standards for communication between different instances of the software. This should allow you to, say, host your own project on your own Launchpad, but still have bug reports communicated automatically with Ubuntu.

Oh, wow!

[TobyRush]

Canonical Begins to Open-Source Launchpad

Hey, that's great! I always get excited when advectives begin to noun things.

Re:ORM == good

[bockelboy]

ORM is great! ... until you you have a couple hundred thousand rows. Then it's slow. ... until you have a couple million rows. Then it's unbearable.

I love ORM for smaller applications, but there's always a point where heading down the hall to say "hi" to the local DBA is a good idea. And beware, redesigning the DB from the ORM to your own schema can be extremely painful. How close the ORM schema is to "pleasant" depends highly upon the package you use.

This is from someone who is trying to perform queries on someone else's database designed with Hibernate. One that has 12 million rows (average row size, 9KB). Which has been running my simple query for 40 minutes.

One Launchpad to rule them all..

[rustalot42684]

The reason they don't opensource it because there should only be one Launchpad, or you get all kinds of complex problems that are totally unnecessary. The point of Launchpad is to have a central system to manage things. Why do you need your own Launchpad, when it's better for it to be centralized?

Re:One Launchpad to rule them all..

[nuzak]

Launchpad is a bug tracker, with some project management features. The bug tracker in Sourceforge is easily its worst feature, and it has zero project management facilities (at least not in the free version).

Re:ORM == good

[Cyberax]

Your statement is just plain stupid.

Decent ORMs do nothing but map object operations into SQL statements. SQL from an ORM tool is not going to magically work more faster or slower than a hand-written one.

Again, decent DB schemas (i.e. fairly normalized ones) map nicely into object models (hell, ER-diagrams used to model relational tables map directly into object diagrams). It's the databases with weird tables without PKs and strange stored procs which do not map well.

I've worked with Hibernate application handling OLAP operations on 10 terabytes of data without any problems.