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Is launchpad GPL ?

Asked by Zorglub

Just a question...

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Ralph Janke (txwikinger) said : 		#1

Thanks for the question.

See https://launchpad.net/faq under "Is Launchpad open source? Will it be?"

I hope this helps.

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Zorglub (jean-frm) said : 		#2

Seems unclear to me, as I am not a programmer. Does it mean Launchpad is copywrited to canonical ? Or is it that launchpad is using closed source software (not belonging to canonical) to work ?

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Alan Pope 🍺🐧🐱 🦄 (popey) said : 		#3

You are confusing copyright and license, two entirely different things.

Code is most often copyrighted to the person or persons who wrote it, or their employer, or some other third party that they have donated the copyright too.

The license specifies the terms under which the software is provided, and whether the source will be available.

At the moment some elements of Launchpad are open source, some are not. The idea is to eventually open source the whole thing, but that isn't the case right now.

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Best debianmigrant (debianmigrant) said : 		#4

This is what Mark Shuttleworth had to say about it at Ubuntu Open week

(https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MeetingLogs/openweekfeisty/askmark)

<ryuujin_> QUESTION: why is launchpad a proprietary software?

    *

      several reasons. first, it's worth pointing out that we fund a huge amount of GPL software development. so LP is not non-free because we don't know any better in general. we've thought about it very carefully. the major reason is that LP is explicitly a short-term, WRONG solution to the problem. the problem is a lack of information flow between projects. the right solution, from an engineering perspective, is a federated, distributed, standards-based approach. where data from bugzilla flows to LP, and into debbugs, and into roundup, and into sourceforge. then everyone uses their preferred tools, and the data just migrates as needed. but, we couldn't wait for that to happen, so we wrote a tool for ubuntu that new how to link to other tools. now, if there were MULTIPLE tools like that, it would divide the eyeballs interested in agregating this information. so, imaging you have a bug, reported in ubuntu, debian, upstream and gentoo. with LP, someone from each community just has to annotate it once, saying "our bug tracker knows about that issue, and we are tracking it as #324342". if there were multiple LP's, people would have to do that work multiple times. the result would be a mess. you would not have 1 bug number for 1 problem. no more Bug #1! so that's the major issue. we have released bits of code that we thought WOULD be useful to other communities. either infrastructure stuff (Zope, SQLObject, translation bits etc). or app stuff. we do have a plan to get to a point where we can GPL it. but that involves a lot of work, and i think it will take time, i don't want anyone to expect it to be free in 2-3 years even. but we're working to that roadmap, and will hopefully get there

Hope that helps

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Zorglub (jean-frm) said : 		#5

Thanks.