[Launchpad-users] Launchpad is now open source.

[Karl Fogel <karl.fogel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone -- Launchpad is now open source.

Huge congrats (and thanks) to the Canonical Launchpad team, who worked
overtime to make this happen sooner rather than later.

Note that although we announced previously that we'd be holding back two
components (codehosting and soyuz), we changed our minds :-).  They are
opened too -- all the code is open.  Our public announcements are here:

  http://blog.canonical.com/?p=192
  http://www.ubuntu.com/news/canonical-open-sources-launchpad

The Canonical launchpad developers will be on IRC in #launchpad-dev on
irc.freenode.net.  For real time development discussion, that's the
place to go; for usage questions, #launchpad is still the channel, as
before.

The development wiki is dev.launchpad.net.  Right now, only Canonical
people can edit it.  We'll expand the access list eventually, but just
for these first few days I'd like to leave it tightly controlled because
there will be a lot of eyeballs on it, and we need to figure out the
right strategy to allow the good edits while preventing vandalism and
spam.  (I've run other wikis, and spam is *by far* the majority of all
edits to any open wiki, so we'll need to do that carefully.)

The mailing list is launchpad-dev {AT} lists.launchpad.net, which you
can join by visiting https://launchpad.net/~launchpad-dev and joining
the team there (a team and a mailing list are sort of the same thing in
Launchpad).  Again, that's the development mailing list; user questions
should still go to launchpad-users {AT} lists.launchpad.net.

Canonical is continuing to host Launchpad.net, of course, so we will vet
and shepherd changes onto the production servers.  The wiki explains the
basics of how to learn your way around the code, make patches, and get
code review; these processes will evolve organically, and we'll keep the
wiki updated as they do.

Note that the images/icons are still copyrighted traditionally, to
protect Launchpad's visual identity.  But they're shipped with the code
and are fine to use for development and testing purposes.  Just if you
launch a production server, it needs to look different -- and have a
different name, of course, as "Launchpad" is a trademark.  From our
point of view, we're doing this to improve our hosted service, so if you
feel the need to run it on your own servers, that might mean we're doing
something wrong, in which case we hope you'll tell us what.

Please bear with us as we learn how to be an open source team.  Many of
the Launchpad developers have open source experience of course, but as a
team we've been working on Launchpad in-house for some years.  This is a
big change.  We're eager and ready, though.

That's everything.  Questions welcome, and patches too.

-Karl Fogel