Canonical Fully Open-Sources the Launchpad Code 104
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.'"
Debian (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Bazaar only? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I guess it closes bug #393596 ? (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
Really? (Score:4, Interesting)
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/377005 [launchpad.net]
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubunet/+bug/375345 [launchpad.net]
Re: Ask Sterling Ball (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I guess it closes bug #393596 ? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Is the AGPL a EULA? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.