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?