Slashdot Mirror
Canonical Fully Open-Sources the Launchpad Code
kfogel writes "Canonical has just fully open-sourced the code to Launchpad. Although we'd said earlier that a couple of components would be held back, we changed our mind. All the code has been released under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3. 'Canonical will continue to run the Launchpad servers, taking care of production and deployment issues; opening up the code doesn't mean burdening the users with all of that stuff. At the same time, we'll institute processes to shepherd community-contributed code into the system, so that people who have ideas for how to improve Launchpad can quickly turn these ideas into reality.'"
Status should be changed to "Fix released", then:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-community/+bug/393596
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
Actually they promised something like four years ago (give or take a few months), but only set a date for its open sourcing about 7 months ago. They were behind their own deadline, but they also released the source for Soyuz and Code Hosting, so I guess they spent those extra few weeks well.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
People from slashdotters, to bloggers, to self appointed tech reviewers, to wall street lackwits try to read drama into everything that happens in the computing world. A new Firefox is the IE Killer, Chrome was the FF and IE killer, Android was the iPhone killer, etc ad nauseum. It's almost as if people DEMAND that one killer OS, and a handful of killer apps rule the world. God help us if that ever does happen. It would be pure hell trying to be "different". It would be like - like - well - it would be like loving Linux in a Microsoft world!!!
No, I don't think that Canonical released the source code for PPA in response to Google's new operating system. In fact, if you think about it, they have just GIVEN Google a somewhat tested means to release their OS and updates. I mean, it's OPEN SOURCE - even Microsoft can take it and use it! (Hole shit, what an idea!!! What if Microsoft picks up on it, and gives people a decent update system? The world might actually change for the better!)
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
That's ass backwards. We need *more* PPAs with the latest versions. What's missing is an easy way to pick them from a checklist while automatically fetching GPG keys. This way you have something like an open app store, and it solves the problem of not having recent enough versions in the repository - you need a bleeding edge version, you check the relevant PPA and the latest bells and whistles magically appear in the package manager.
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
Personally I'm waiting for them to add better integration of PPAs into Synaptic. For example, when I need a bleeding edge version of Banshee, or some application not in Debian like Handbrake, I pick its PPA from a list, enter the password and it magically appears in Synaptic. After this I'm asked which programs from this PPA I want to install (again a list for PPAs that have several). Since it allows only PPAs and not some arbitrary repositories, it could be protected against malware to some extent. This would change software installation on Ubuntu from good to groundbreaking.
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.