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.'"

Comments

sweet

[BladeMelbourne]

I [heart] this company and Ubuntu,

Debian

[James_Duncan8181]

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.

Re:Debian

[Tweenk]

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.

Re:Debian

[Dr_Barnowl]

The problem with this is that PPA means "Personal" Package archive and a lot of them are just that - an arbitrary repository. In many cases you are trusting some random stranger, and not Canonical, to have produced a package that doesn't contain horrendous malware. Every Launchpad user is entitled to a 1GB PPA just by signing up. Mine contains packages for MythTV with patches to fix a bug that hasn't made it out to the stable branch yet. You can install them if you really want to, but do you trust me? And how do you distinguish from all the other people with MythTV in their PPA?

Lots of projects have links to deb packages that install their GPG key and their PPA, after which you can see them in Synaptic, but this still isn't any guarantee. About the only thing you can do is be careful which groups you install keys and PPAs from. And I'd guess the reason that more of them aren't in the Universe repository is that the task of vetting them all is a mammoth one.

I guess it closes bug #393596 ?

[migla]

Status should be changed to "Fix released", then:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-community/+bug/393596

Re:I guess it closes bug #393596 ?

[James_Duncan8181]

"Not really - the bug is calling for code to be released under a Free licence. The AGPL isn't a Free licence."

what.

It is approved by both the OSI and, obviously, the FSF. Are you trolling?

Re:I guess it closes bug #393596 ?

[migla]

Wrong. Straight from the GNU:s mouth:

"The GNU Affero General Public License is a free, copyleft license [...]"

http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/agpl-3.0.html

Re:I guess it closes bug #393596 ?

[Attila Dimedici]

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).

Re:I guess it closes bug #393596 ?

[gbjbaanb]

its not quite like that - we had a surprise inspection from Microsoft.. well, they surprised us by telling us we'd be inspected, and they kindly offered to come and do an analysis of our software licences to see which ones we'd accidentally forgotten to buy.

Unfortunately, the analysis required the use of a 3rd party who were very happy to charge us only a reasonable sum to let us run a licence-checker tool on every workstation and send the results to them where they'd put it in excel and tell us how many licences we should have bought, leaving us to compare that to the number we had bought.

so in effect, we had to pay to inspect ourselves. And we still owe MS a bundle!

Re:Talk about hoops

[Anonymous Coward]

First problem is they require bzr 1.16.1 to download their rocket-fuel-setup script, the latest available version in the Ubuntu repo is 1.13.1 -- so you have to manually add the PPA source.

Why do they not have the version *they* use in the repo for *their* operating system?

Don't be a drama queen now, 1.16.1 was only recently released and you know Ubuntu policy about stable releases.

And because there's no way to just _get the source_ (ie. a tarball with source files in it) there's no way to download it without screwing with Apache.

bzr get lp:launchpad

Is that easy enough for you? ;)

How about a way to browse it online? I just wanted to see what language it was in, according to the docs it's Python but it would have been nice to be able to take a look at it without spending "a few hours to get everything" jumping through hoops.

https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~launchpad-pqm/launchpad/stable/files

Re:What influenced this move?

[fandingo]

Did Google's Chrome OS have something to do with this move, I think so. Why you may ask: Because entry of another Linux based Open Source OS into the Linux playground does nothing to further Canonical's ambitions.

Now waiting on Adobe and its Flash Technologies to do likewise.

What on earth are you talking about? This has nothing to do with a desktop operating system. Furthermore, Canonical promised a year ago tomorrow to release the source code within a year. This pre-dates the announcement of Chrome OS by at least 11 months.

Re:What influenced this move?

[Norsefire]

Did Google's Chrome OS have something to do with this move

No, I think it was more that Microsoft contributed code the Kernel and they didn't want to be accused of having closed-sourced software when even Microsoft was opening up. Or maybe it was the vulnerabilities found in the Kernel, they decided if exploits could slip into the most-watched open source project they need to get more eyes on their code. It could have even been that because the world is supposed to end in 2012, but I think I would be drawing a correlation where there isn't one if I said that.

Re:What influenced this move?

[ciroknight]

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.

Really?

[CarpetShark]

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/377005

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubunet/+bug/375345