Launchpad was initially criticized by the Jem Report and other members of the free software community for not being available under a free license, such as the
GNU GPL, despite its aims. In response, the developers stated that they aimed to eventually release it under a free software license, but that it could potentially take years. On 9 July 2007,
Canonical Ltd. released
Storm, the first Launchpad component made available under a free software license. Founder
Mark Shuttleworth's responded to this criticism saying "we are all actively working on making Launchpad open source" adding that the funding the salaries of Launchpad's developers to be higher priority, and claiming immediate release would result multiple
unfederated instances of Launchpad. However, this still left some members of the
open-source movement dissatisfied. On 22 July 2008, Mark Shuttleworth announced at
OSCON that the complete source code would be released within the next twelve months. On 19 December 2008,
Canonical Ltd. released the Launchpad component "lazr.config" and "lazr.delegates" under version 3 of the
GNU LGPL. An open
API is currently in beta testing, which will allow programs to interact with the website. Calls for an open API to be released were aided by projects like Leonov that resorted to
screen scraping to get data from Launchpad. In December 2008, Canonical announced that the source code to the Launchpad website would be released under a free software license by 21 July 2009. It was also announced that two large components of Launchpad, Soyuz (which is responsible for the build system, package management and Ubuntu package publishing) and Codehosting, would not be released under a free software license. Later, the specific date was changed to a more general timeframe of July/August 2009. However, on 21 July 2009, the software was released under the
AGPLv3 (a fully free license specifically for web services), including the two components (Codehosting and Soyuz) that were initially planned to remain proprietary. ==See also==