By announcing that it has open-sourced its Launchpad project under the Affero GPL version 3, a year after rumors swirled that it would, has Canonical licensed away one of its best revenue opportunities?
Roughly two years ago, I walked up London's High Road from Seven Sisters Tube Station with Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical and the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution. Mark and I talked about a range of things, but one of the things that particularly caught my attention was Launchpad, a collaboration and hosting platform for open-source projects that makes it easy to track code, ideas, and other things across projects.
Then, as now, Launchpad struck me as a fertile field for Canonical to discover a scalable, winning business model to support Ubuntu development. In fact, I remember a long conversation with open-source guru Larry Augustin about Launchpad. Augustin felt that there was a great business lurking in Launchpad.
I agreed.
While I can see how "opening up Launchpad gives the free-software world the beginnings of an open, programmatic interface to its own infrastructure," as Canonical speculates, I'm struggling to see how it helps Canonical make money. Any chance of directly monetizing Launchpad is effectively gone now.
That, of course, may not be the point. Canonical has been experimenting with other models, including hosted services that may well be augmented by this move.
As RedMonk analyst James Governor suggests, "(It may be) possible to make money as a tools company, without owning the runtime, if you offer hosting for the apps. IDE (integrated development environment) + cloud = dollars." Open source may help to make Launchpad more widely used, which, in turn, better positions it to be a Canonical-sponsored on-ramp to the Canonical-monetized cloud.
Not a bad idea. (Certainly better than the apperi-sponsored Ubuntu application store, as reported by The VAR Guy.)
It does suggest, however, that Canonical may be placing a lot of eggs in the cloud basket, a basket that has yet to prove that it can deliver solid, consistent returns to software companies. It comes with its own baggage, as Jonathan Zittrain writes).
Time will tell if the cloud can feed Canonical's employees. But Shuttleworth isn't the sort of person to do something just because all the "in" kids are open-sourcing these days. Licensing Launchpad under the AGPL version 3 is a calculated move. We just don't know what the calculus will yield quite yet.
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Just seven days after Bastille Day, France's day for celebrating its freedom, Ubuntu will unfetter Launchpad as an open-source project, as announced on the Launchpad news blog.
Launchpad is an open-source project-hosting service that promises to make it "easy to share code, bug reports, translations, and ideas across projects." It's a great service--so robust that MySQL moved its project hosting to Launchpad in early 2008--but has been proprietary, and will remain so until it goes open source on July 21.
and expect that opening up its source code will take the project in interesting, unforeseen directions. That's the power of open source and a good indicator of Mark Shuttleworth's commitment to open source.
Just a few short years ago, there was one open-source hosting service worth considering: Sourceforge.net. It was by no means perfect (Alfresco's analytics, for example, have been down for over a month on Sourceforge, with no apparent urgency to fix the problem), but it was good enough, free, and everyone else used it.
Today, there are multiple options, including Google Code, Microsoft CodePlex, CodeHaus, GitHub, and, interestingly, Canonical's Launchpad.
Yes, Launchpad. Launchpad is the brainchild of Mark Shuttleworth's Ubuntu team, but it has aspirations beyond hosting the Ubuntu code, aspirations that recently attracted MySQL to move its code over to the Launchpad service.
I don't recall Launchpad starting with this third-party code hosting premise in mind, but it certainly has gone there fast. OStatic has an excellent write-up on its new features, and whether they're compelling enough to put your open-source project there.
For a new project, it's definitely an interesting choice. But the larger question is whether an established project - especially commercial projects - gets adequate value from any hosting service to justify hosting with a prefabricated hosting service. SugarCRM moved from Sourceforge to hosting its own project, and other companies have done the same. (My own company is in the process of exploring options.)
Why host your own project? Why take on that cost?
... Read moreI've written about Launchpad, Ubuntu's software hosting and development website that enables collaboration across multiple projects, but I'm even more excited now that Mark Shuttleworth is strongly considering releasing it under the AGPL (Affero GPL). Launchpad is very cool. Keeping it open in a networked world makes it even cooler.
The choice of AGPL - which specifically covers software offered as a networked service - would be appropriate for Launchpad. It would also add some much-needed credibility to AGPL, which has come in for criticism from Chris DiBona, Google's open source program manager. DiBona has said he wants to see more examples of AGPL in action before deciding whether Google supports the license. Google has closed the door to AGPL on its Google Code host site, forcing projects that use the license to leave.
Indeed. Ubuntu is about as close to the cool kid at school as one gets in open source, and Launchpad is at the heart of Ubuntu. This would be a big win for the AGPL.
I am fortunate to count Mark Shuttleworth as a good friend. He's the sort of person who is always genuine. I never get the sense that he's taking shortcuts with me or with the business that he's forming around Ubuntu (i.e., Canonical).
This authenticity in his personality is hugely important for an opportunity looming for him and for Canonical. Like a few big open-source projects and companies, Ubuntu sits at the nexus of various other open-source communities. Unlike perhaps any other, however, Ubuntu has Canonical, a company with a social purpose as much as a corporate purpose.
Herein lies the opportunity, as Mark implies in a conversation he had with Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation:
...(It) seems to be that recognizing that enhancing the productivity of collaboration between different groups is a real way to boost the platform as a whole. And at Ubuntu we feel this very, very keenly because not only do we want to collaborate with other upstream projects like Apache or X or Open Office, but we also very much want to be part of and collaborate with Debian which is a very large project in its own right.
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Canonical continues to push the envelope for ease of development, announcing that it will release its Personal Package Archive (PPA) service. As Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reports, PPA makes it easy for developers to modify and publish a package for Ubuntu without a committee group hug to bless the decision. It also means it will be much easier to get software into the hands of users/testers to glean their feedback:
PPA, which has been in beta since July, is a major part of Ubuntu's own development system, Launchpad. Launchpad is a set of integrated tools that support collaboration and community formation. These include a team management tool, a bug tracker, code hosting, translations, a blueprint tracker and an answer tracker. Its best feature, the bug-tracker, works by trying to track separate conversations about the same bug in external project bug trackers, such as Bugzilla, Roundup, SourceForge and the Debian Bug Tracking System.
... Read more
Mark Shuttleworth is on a quest to control the British media. Or maybe he isn't, and it's the British media that is on a quest to give him maximum coverage. Whichever it is, my recent trip to London had Mark on the BBC and in this Economist article about free software, and Ubuntu's role in it.
Mark does an excellent job of balancing idealism and pragmatism in how he approaches open source, which comes across perfectly in the article:
...[O}pen-source software tends to polarise opinion. It has vociferous critics who suspect that software written by idealistic nerds, and made available free to anyone who wants to download it, must be some kind of communist plot. Zealous believers, meanwhile, long for open source to triumph over the evil empires of commercial software. This clash is often depicted as an epic struggle for supremacy between Linux and Microsoft's proprietary Windows operating system. But the truth is that most computer users do not know or care about the politics of open-source software. Mr Shuttleworth says most people simply want to read their e-mail, browse the web and so on.
... Read more
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