Comment 11 for bug 50699

The revenue point seems to get down to the same old questions of "can you make money with free software?" But I know at least that it's dangerous to dish out exceptions on 'accepting' proprietary software (on such grounds), and unfortunately sometimes ones' goals blind this.

Anyway, the point of 'multiple incompatible instances of launchpad' just doesn't float at all for me. Launchpad is a web project management piece of software. Why the heck shouldn't other people have their own deployment of it and then determine exactly how it works? And so what if Launchpad.net doesn't directly get the attention? I don't really see Bugzilla developers insisting on only one location for people to file bugs and use the software; same goes for Trac, Mediawiki, etc etc.

That it's okay to do this on the grounds of Google and SourceForge doing it is not really justifiable.

Then multiple launchpads wouldn't be 'compatible' together. Again, so what? Why should they have to be? It would be silly to use multiple instances of launchpad within a single product, and that's the only way I can see that you'd really want some compatibility between multiple launchpad accounts. But what if KDE, or Amarok, or Limewire want to have their own Launchpad?

I'm hardly going to maintain that all proprietary software is evil, and of course I have no problems using launchpad or sourceforge. If the revenue issue is really the driving force for keeping it proprietary, then why not just put ads on the site (which may well generate enough revenue) and be done with it? Ads suck, indeed, but I'd be very interested in seeing the person who would choose to not have a few ads on their site over freedom. Of course you could also have a donation drive, which I'm sure would generate some $$.