Comment 12 for bug 50699

Revision history for this message
Mark Shuttleworth (sabdfl) wrote : Re: [Bug 50699] Re: Launchpad should be free software (free as in freedom)

Francis Giannaros wrote:
> 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?
The point of LP is to aggregate information from many sources. For
example, linking each bug in Ubuntu to the relevant bug in upstream,
Debian, and other distros. That "cross-project view" is what makes LP
somewhat different.

It seems silly to expect people to do that work multiple times - once in
each "instance" of Launchpad.

A better engineering solution to this would be federated communication
between bugzilla instances, and roundup, and sourceforge, and Launchpad.
I spoke about that at length in the recent ACCU conference. However, it
will take time to put the relevant standards and API's in place to make
all of those codebases exchange information automatically, and Launchpad
is a stopgap solution that we built to address our need to collaborate
effectively with those other projects without requiring them to change
their infrastructure at all.

We are working on API's that let you talk directly to LP, so you can
automatically extract all the data you put into it at any time (you can
already get easily-parseable text views of bugs, and translations as PO
files). The goal is to make it easy to adopt and abandon as you wish.

Please don't be cavalier with other people's livelihoods. If you have a
genuine plan to build a better alternative, then please enter the race
and do so, that's the nature of competition. I wish there had been
something like this in free software when we started, we would have used
that instead. As it is, I think we have a reasonable plan to get
Launchpad to the point where we can release it as free software and
still fund ongoing development on it. It may take us some years to get
there, but we will keep working on it till the scenario becomes clear.