Comment 27 for bug 50699

For the record, I think Canonical has a very sophisticated view of the
free software model. We directly fund a huge amount of free software
development, through Ubuntu, Bazaar, Storm and other projects. The vast
majority of the code we work on and publish is published under the GPL.
So we know where we get a lot of participation, and where we don't. Our
expectation is that Launchpad would not attract a lot of participation.

The pattern that has emerged in my mind is that the more frequently
developers actually execute a piece of code on their laptops, the more
likely they will participate when they can. Bazaar (bzr -
bazaar-vcs.org) has attracted an amazing community, because lots of
people use it every day. CSCVS is another piece of Launchpad that we
released, and it gets virtually no participation, because virtually
nobody actually runs it. People use it via LP, they don't run it themselves.

I do expect Launchpad will be fully open source in time. I discuss this
regularly with the Launchpad team, almost all of whom are significant
open source contributors to Python, Zope, Bugzilla, Bazaar, and other
major projects. We all want to get to that point, we also all don't
think that releasing it in one lump will actually help.

Right now we are trying to figure out a standardised way to export all
data in LP so nobody worries about data lockin. That at least is
establishing a best-practice for web services that I hope other sites
will follow.