Launchpad - closed source

[Morgan Collett]

On 11/6/06, Andrew Zajac <arzajac at gmail.com> wrote:
> Free software is free because of the terms by which it is distributed.
>  A free licence makes the software free - the licence is between the
> author of the software and the person who downloads the application.
>
> Launchpad is not distributed.  No one else runs it but Canonical, so
> there is no such licence that comes into play.
>
> The question is whether Canoncal is being a good citizen by not
> distributing the code under a GPL-compatible licence even though the
> goal is to not have more than one launchpad up and running.

Most big web apps built on Free Software are not Free themselves, or
distributable. Think Google, Yahoo, Amazon etc. However they are
success stories in the Free/OSS world.

Just because Launchpad is closely coupled with Ubuntu doesn't make it
different from the above. Ubuntu could exist without Launchpad -
however Launchpad is itself a strategic platform.

Eventually Launchpad will track bugs, translations, bzr branches and
hence patches across many upstream projects and also many Ubuntu
derivatives, and act as a hub that unifies the loose "bazaar" (in the
ESR sense not bzr) that is the Free/OSS world. Want the latest Gentoo
kernel patch? It will be on a bzr branch related to the Gentoo distro
and also the kernel project. Want to track that filesystem bug that
occurs in the upstream kernel source and also in Fedora and also in
U/Ku/Edubuntu/Mepis/gNewSense? Look in Launchpad, and as soon as
somebody commits a bzr patch (or a cvs or svn or whatever patch which
is synced into bzr format on the supermirror) which closes that bug in
their source or distro, boom, it's available for everybody to
cherrypick.

A question: Will gNewSense remove all references to searching on
Google from the browser(s), because Google's web code is Non-Free?