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.'"

Talk about hoops

[Norsefire]

It's as if they don't want anyone to download it.

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?

That aside, the rocket-fuel script then downloads, unpacks, installs, alters and generally takes too long. And if that wasn't enough ...

## Note that this will make changes to your Apache configuration if ## you already have an Apache server on your box. It will also add ## entries to /etc/hosts and it will setup a postgresql server on ## you box. ## If you want to play safe with regards to your existing Apache, ## try this out in a virtual environment first.

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.

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.

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:Talk about hoops

[Anonymous Coward]

You can browse the code here:

http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~launchpad-pqm/launchpad/devel/files [launchpad.net]

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: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 [fsf.org]

Re:I guess it closes bug #393596 ?

[quantic_oscillation7]

"This is a free software, copyleft license. Its terms effectively consist of the terms of GPLv3, with an additional paragraph in section 13 to allow users who interact with the licensed software over a network to receive the source for that program. We recommend that developers consider using the GNU AGPL for any software which will commonly be run over a network." http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/index_html#GPLCompatibleLicenses [fsf.org]

Re:I guess it closes bug #393596 ?

[the_womble]

The AGPL requires you to make the source code available to people who use the software over a network - so you cannot use AGPL code in a web app on the public internet without releasing the source.

The stuff about inspecting premises is FUD. I think this is a new version of an old troll comment.

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: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.

Re:Debian

[stevey]

And we could call that "unstable", right?

Actually launchpad for Debian would suck - we shouldn't have to sign up to a site to submit bug reports.

Re:I guess it closes bug #393596 ?

[Espinas217]

It is clearly less free than the GPL just as the GPL is less free than BSD.

Whether it is free enough to count as free is a matter of opinion.

Less free to whom? to the end user is just the same as they don't intend to redistribute the software. To some user who wants to distribute the code, it's less free. To the original developer no, it gives him the freedom to choose how his code is being distributed.

Re:Debian

[Nevyn]

Personally I'm waiting for them to add better integration of PPAs into Synaptic.

Well unless the authors become dumbasses overnight, you'll probably be waiting a long time. Package management needs to be a single coherent database, making it much more distributed than it needs to be is just asking for pain ... PPAs/KoPeRs aren't terrible in moderation, and solve a couple of problems. But if you make them easily available (ie. available to people who don't know what problems they cause) the solution is much worse than the problem.

Re:Bazaar only?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand why people have to move. PPA isn't exclusive of Subversion, or any other system, is it?

Launchpad's PPAs use existing Debian tools to submit source packages, along with some custom scripts to compile them.

To add a package to a PPA, you only need to upload a few files to a FTP server (after signing them with GPG).

Launchpad uses Bazaar for its hosted version control system. This is independent of the PPAs (and the Bug tracker, translation tool, and most everything else).