He even sees Launchpad as more malevolent than Microsoft.

"And why is this more dangerous than Microsoft? Microsoft did a pretty clever thing: By good marketing, clever programming and commercial pressure, they locked in a lot of people to use Microsoft products and formats. This is evil, but we have found a solution to that: reverse engeneering and Free Software. Microsoft can be coped with.

"But Google and Launchpad were even cleverer. Instead of locking something in, they open everything: It is free, it has nice usable APIs to integrate in applications, and they suck all that opened data in and keep a hold of it. And while Microsoft has a record of doing a bad job when it comes to technical quality, thus helps the alternative, non-evil, Free Software, Google, and probably Launchpad, excells (sic) in what they doing, thus reducing the immidiate (sic) need for alternatives altogether."

Canonical chief Mark Shuttleworth obviously sees things differently. I asked him whether there was any timeframe for opening up Launchpad in its entirety. I also mentioned a quote by former Debian project leader Anthony Towns ("the only logical conclusion to that is that LaunchPad will be free when Canonical/Ubuntu are the only players in the market, or when Canonical's current business model fails and they switch to a different one") and asked for his reaction.

His response: "Open source is the right model for a shared infrastructure and we are on track to open source Launchpad." He didn't give any timeframe; he has made statements similar to this before.

He went on: "Right now the largest concern we have is that Launchpad was designed to be a centralised system, and having multiple instances of it would fragment the community and not help in the same way that Launchpad currently does help. Launchpad was a quick fix for us to solve a particular problem, and in fact a better solution would be truly federated tools for everyone rather than a single one-size-fits-all approach.

"We don't want to lock people in, so we have a public commitment to ensuring that there is an export capability for any data in Launchpad without resorting to screenscraping. We have people actively working on that capability, and in the interim have made a public commitment to give anyone their data, or data for their project, as a straight database dump in csv or other appropriate, parseable format."

Shuttleworth offered reassurance: "We have absolutely no desire to lock people in to Launchpad or make it difficult to move off Launchpad because they can't extract their data."

And added: "Last, I think its worth pointing out that we've expressly designed Launchpad to allow people to continue to use their preferred bug tracker, for example, and still collaborate with people through Launchpad. You can connect any bug in Ubuntu to any upstream bug in bugzilla or mantis or roundup, for example, using Launchpad. At the moment that just results in status changes upstream being notified to people subscribed to the bug in Launchpad, but in future we will have the tools to enable comments in Launchpad to flow automatically to the relevant upstream bugzilla too."

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