Launchpad to be free

[Bruce Dawson]

Greg Rundlett wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 8:43 PM, Bill McGonigle <bill at bfccomputing.com>wrote:
>
>   
>> On 02/27/2009 08:35 PM, Jarod Wilson wrote:
>>     
>>> Somewhere or another there was an explanation in writing... Oh, there,
>>> found it:
>>>       
>> Ah:
>>
>> "There are two components, Soyuz and Codehosting, that we're keeping
>> internal. They're part of Canonical's "secret sauce" in business areas
>> that we care a lot about, and for now the costs to us of opening them up
>> outweigh the benefits."
>>
>>     
>
> My simple interpretation is that Canonical sees a benefit in opening (most)
> of Launchpad which should strengthen their position in the marketplace.
> Once their leadership position is further solidified, they have less risk
> with completing what they started (Mark Shuttleworth said he would like to
> open the source to Launchpad a long time ago).  The alternate - assuming
> they were even ready - seems like it would risk people opening dozens of
> code hosting sites (seeking ad revenue) which serves to only fragment the
> market for code hosting.
>
> An over-simplification is that they are open-sourcing to compete against and
> catch up to services like GitHub.
>
> The skeptic would say they are opening enough to get free labor AND
> increased market share to fuel new product development (aka Launchpad
> Enterprise).
>
> The fact that Sourceforge (the code) was free a long time ago, and went
> through free/non-free versions is an example of how money interests can
> trump freedom.  I'd also say that the quality of the Sourceforge system
> would be much better if it were free (e.g. it doesn't support other version
> control systems).  Sourceforge's TOS basically "All your code are belong to
> us" (you grant them a proprietary license [1]).   I think it's a big plus to
> the community that we will once again have a free code hosting system.
> Maybe this time they won't follow the same path as Sourceforge.  Or maybe
> not.  Karl Fogel seems to be very much involved in this [2] and he was also
> very much involved (in Subversion and) CollabNet [3], so he would know the
> true intentions and dynamics at play.
>
> I guess what I'm saying is that either Canonical wants to be in the Code
> Hosting business, or not.  I don't know.  I'm hoping for the latter.  What I
> do know is that we have room for improvement because there really aren't ANY
> free and complete code hosting systems [4].
>
> [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sourceforge#cite_note-4
> [2] https://dev.launchpad.net/OpenSourcing#what
> [3] http://producingoss.com/cv/
> [4]
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open_source_software_hosting_facilities
>   

Risking being called on what "free and complete" means, I would venture
to say that savannah.gnu.org and savannah.nongnu.org are very free (at
least in the GNU sense of free), and complete enough for me to host at
least one project on.

--Bruce