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.

See also

• Podcast: Launchpod 15 - Launchpad’s going open source!