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See this blog post: [[http://news.launchpad.net/general/how-we-are-open-sourcing-launchpad|How we're open-sourcing Launchpad]]. |
Open Sourcing Launchpad
We're open-sourcing the code that runs Launchpad.net. The process will be completed by 21 July 2009, coinciding with the 3.0 release (see the schedule of releases).
Why open-source Launchpad?
This isn't just about freeing up the code; we have a chance to do something unique among open-source collaboration sites.
A new Launchpad release comes out every month; furthermore, bleeding-edge changes to Launchpad quickly go live through the continuous beta testing system. This allows a developer to make a bugfix or an improvement to Launchpad and get real-world testing on the change fairly quickly. Thus a primary site of Launchpad development will be Launchpad.net itself, not just developers' external sandboxes, and the development/testing cycle will mesh closely with people's normal workflows. The result: greater efficiency and much better responsiveness to user needs than is usually the case in open development of a hosted service.
What license?
The GNU Affero GPL, version 3.
Absolutely everything?
Almost. There are a few features, not integral to Launchpad as a collaboration platform, that for technical or strategic reasons we're not opening up. They're heavily customized for Canonical's workflow and we need them to stay that way -- to open them up would merely be to invite frustration (at least for us), as we wouldn't be able to foster a truly open development community around them anyway. However, even in those cases, there are other components that can be used to achieve similar functionality without the Canonical-specific behaviors.
How is it being open-sourced?
See this blog post: How we're open-sourcing Launchpad.
Much of the code in Launchpad is modularized already, and will be released as independent packages over the next six months. (In fact, this process has already begun — for example see Storm, LAZR.config, and LAZR.delegates.) The separating out of such packages will continue after Launchpad is open-sourced too; there will just be more people participating then.
There are also a number of non-coding tasks, which we'll do roughly according to this schedule:
- Jan 26, 2009 (Wed)
- (Launchpad 2.2.1 release.) Publish pre-release open-sourcing FAQ. We can anticipate some of the questions, but this announcement may stimulate more we hadn't thought of.
- Feb 24, 2009 (Tue)
- Finish internal license vetting, to make sure we don't violate anyone else's license when we open-source.
- Feb 25, 2009 (Wed)
- (Launchpad 2.2.2 release.)
- Mar 18, 2009 (Wed)
Developer documentation wiki populated.
- Apr 1, 2009 (Wed)
- (Launchpad 2.2.3 release.)
- Apr 29, 2009 (Wed)
- (Launchpad 2.2.4 release.)
- May 27, 2009 (Wed)
- (Launchpad 2.2.5 release; UDS). Take development discussion public: move real-time discussion over to #launchpad-dev on irc.freenode.net, take development mailing list public. Publish a Contributor License Agreement (CLA).
- Jun 24, 2009 (Wed)
- (Launchpad 2.2.6 release.)
- Jul 21, 2009 (Tue)
- Open-source Launchpad itself; release 3.0.