Comment 9 for bug 50699

I believe this is a critical bug - I was tempted to bump up the importance, but triggering a flamewar wouldn't do any of us much good. Nonetheless Ubuntu is suffering badly through launchpad not being free. Rather than rehashing the practical and philosophical arguments about it, maybe it's useful to have a view of just how much this is increasing people's mistrust of Ubuntu

 - complaining about it was part of the platform that got Sam Hocevar elected as Debian Project Leader [email at http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse/2006-11/msg03788.html, which Sam cited in his manifesto at http://www.debian.org/vote/2007/platforms/sho]
 - The formation of Gnewsense was driven in part by launchpad not being free. Open-sourcing launchpad would make it much easier to bring these people back into working directly on ubuntu [http://www.fsf.org/news/gnewsense]

There are dozens more examples of worries over Launchpad's non-free status worrying the open-source community, making people unwilling to use/support Ubuntu:
 - http://www.joachim-breitner.de/blog/archives/60-Launchpad,-Google-and-why-Microsoft-is-not-the-problem.html
 - http://eskar.dk/andreas/blog/?p=219
 - http://charismacode.blogspot.com/2007/01/powers-and-repositories-ubuntu-and.html
 - http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/blog/?p=218#comment-7715
 - http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/blog/2005/06/07
 - http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=123418
 - http://azure.humbug.org.au/%7Eaj/blog/2005/09/04#2005-09-04-launchpad-freeness
 - Bug #55486 is also related ('FAQ should address why LP is not yet free software')

Personally: although I love Ubuntu, it really hurts that if I want to contribute to Ubuntu I must do so with non-free software. I can't fault the people who refuse to use Launchpad on principle, even if that hurts Ubuntu.

Finally, I'm concerned that this bug isn't 'in progress'. Is nobody at Canonical actively working on making Launchpad open source?