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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.'"
Please now consider standardising on this. It's much better technically than Debian's current infrastructure, and will enable much, much easier sharing of patches. Finally the community could be reunified a bit, and PPAs for Stable would also be an important improvement for Debian.
"To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am right."
You can avoid an abrupt transition, though. I've heard that the Bazaar svn plugin is quite good.
The GNU affero is an abomination.
A customer of mine was skeptical about open source. Then one of their people started reading the Affero GPL, and was terrified ("this means they can do a surprise inspection on our premises!") now anything with GPL or open source is out of the question. They even bought an xserve for php
You mean as opposed to the Business Software Alliance? Which you agree to allow to do a surprise inspection on your premises if you buy software from their members (Microsoft, Adobe, etc). Yeah they better not use open source because, you know, those guys might launch a surprise inspection, not that I have ever seen a report of them doing so (unlike the BSA), but they might.
So they better stick to safe software from Microsoft and Adobe, they would never invade the privacy of their customers (except of course when they can make money from doing so).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/377005
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubunet/+bug/375345
Show me any time open software has done anything like what the BSA/Microsoft did to the makers of Music Man guitars (Ernie Ball) and we'll talk: http://news.cnet.com/2008-1082_3-5065859.html Worrying about what could happen is one thing, but knowing what has happened is more significant.
This is actually the first clever use of AGPL I am aware of: it prevents a competitor to form around an altered version of Launchpad. If they try, they have to give it to their users and thus Canonical.
It prevents fragmentation of the code base. Very, very clever.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
So when (assuming it was under the AGPL rather than the GPL) I modify my Drupal settings.php file to include the connection string to my database, do I have to share that with my site visitors? Or do passwords want to be free as well?
The legal advice the Drupal community has got from the FSF with regards to the GPL is that with PHP apps any PHP include files fall under their linking clauses and are subject to the GPL as well. Which means that every Drupal (and also many other similar PHP apps) sites out there are running with code modifications.
I couldn't see anything obvious in the license that provides for situations like this.