grahambinns.com

Mark Shuttleworth, spaceman, ideas man, Ubuntu founder and fearless leader at Canonical Towers announced yesterday that Launchpad will be open sourced within the next 12 months.

This is pretty cool news. With Launchpad, we make a big deal of supporting free and open-source software. Our aim is to provide a central platform through which people and projects can collaborate to produce the best possible products. We're working hard on creating easy-to-use APIs so that people can do everything they can in the Launchpad web interface programmatically, and we're doing a lot of work with upstream bugtrackers to allow us to sync bugs, statuses and comments with them as efficiently as possible.

But the one thing that we hear more often than anything else (except, perhaps, "git is better than bzr," which I'll leave for another day) is "I won't use Launchpad because it's not Open Source." There's a lot of accusations of hypocrisy towards Launchpad: if it's not Open Source how can it, without being deeply hypocritical, aim to become a central point for the development of Open Source software?

I can see people's argument there, though I disagree with them that not having an Open Source platform fundamentally prevents you from supporting open source development because, well, we're doing it anyway. Hopefully this will go some way towards convincing them that we really do mean what we say about being a major part of the Open Source community.

And I confess there's a measure of personal satisfaction in this. No longer (or at least after we've actually made the Open Source release) will I be treated like some sort of mildly infectious Typhoid Mary by otherwise perfectly pleasant people (usually from the FSF, I find) because I develop closed-source software (this happened a few times at UDS in Prague and really started to grate on me).

I confess, though, that when I read the news I did think "so, will I be out of a job in eighteen months time?" I'm sure Mark wouldn't do that, though... Right?

Twitters for Wednesday, 23rd July 2008

• (#) I feel like I should be muttering long, one-syllable words and spraying things with spit this morning.
• (#) Wondering why BoingBoing so often gets little facts wrong before falling into the tired old pattern of hyperbole.
• (#) ...and it's only since the whole Violet Blue unperson thing that I've noticed the flamebaiting arseholes on BoingBoing. Why am I surprised?
• (#) @Reynolds because if you take photos at a pool you must be a paediatrician.
• (#) Rapidly coming to the opinion that there's just no nice way to use GMail to its full potential over IMAP.
• (#) Someone save me from the attention-seeking whingebags.
• (#) Google Reader is offering me a button with which to "Hide Jorge Castro," which tickles me no end.
• (#) Wow, so many photo contests, so little time. Must get to work...
• (#) The frontend of grahambinns.com might be okay, but I need to hit the back-end with the optimisation stick.
• (#) New blog post On religion http://tinyurl.com/5kqsk7

Beautiful quote from Catherine Deveny about religion and National Youth Day (Link, via Pharyngula):

I question some of my progressive, believing mates about if they believe in Noah's ark, the Immaculate Conception, Adam and Eve, the Resurrection, even heaven, and they squirm a little and try to change the subject. They get vague, defensive and then start muttering something about faith and mystery and a power of love that unites us all.

Sure, it would be easy to torture them, but they're adults and it's their life. I just can't see why it's so difficult to have a rigorous discussion about it. I feel no need to convert them. I just want them to know that if you are brave enough to place your hand through the invisible electric fence there's a bigger world beyond.

The whole thing's well worth a read.

Twitters for Tuesday, 22nd July 2008

• (#) New blog post Twitters for 2008-07-21 http://tinyurl.com/6zxug4
• (#) So, that sleeping thing I mentioned last night? Nope.
• (#) /me curses vim's inconsistent indexing style.
• (#) OTOH, anyone who recommends emacs at this juncture is in for a swift poke with a long stick.
• (#) 1, 2, 3, 4, I declare a flamewar...
• (#) Just cleared a load of crap out of my home area that related to the job before last with the Really Crap Web Company. Eeugh.
• (#) And, looking at Really Crap Web Company's website I see the perennial "We're too busy to update our own website" message. Unsurprising.
• (#) BT are making me sad. And I can't get JoikuSpot to work. And I can't seem to use the N95 as a modem. Rah.
• (#) @schwuk So I've heard. Something to play with if I have any spare time...
• (#) Powernaps FTW!

Twitters for Monday, 21st July 2008

• (#) I really need to work on sleeping more. And by "more" I mean "enough so that I'm not exhausted at quarter past nine in the morning."
• (#) Dear spammers: Please don't send me emails about "Special Cream" that actually sell stocks. I WANT THE SPECIAL CREAM.
• (#) I appear to have deleted my brain.
• (#) Is it just me that dislikes overdone HDR images?
• (#) Fighting temptation to mash my forehead against the keyboard.
• (#) urllib2 is giving me a sad.
• (#) Okay, so s/urllib2/Bug-fucking-zilla/ for the last tweet.