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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?

It won't have escaped your notice that I started to write a comment piece on this news story but my blog client (which I really do need to write something about in the not-too-distant future since it's something that I've written and could possibly turn out to be quite useful to a fairly small subset of the Open Source community) fell over. Before it retired to that great stack trace in the sky, however, it managed to vomit up the beginnings of my post onto the internets (a fact about which I have filed a bug) and as a result managed to make me look like both a bit of an idiot and a bit of a bigot. I'm used to the idiot part. I don't like looking like a bigot.

Anyway, since it had made it onto my blog (and I never bothered to check that it hadn't, it also ended up propagating across the interwubs to LiveJournal, where a good friend of mine commented:

Interesting case. If they were only leafleting, though, I can't see the harm, and even if they were preaching in the street, I think asking them to leave was a bit severe. People can quite easily walk past and seal up their ears (as we do every day to resist free newspapers being thrust into our hands) - and Jehova's Witnesses have been door-knocking for years without being asked to leave certain streets. The "Be a winner, not a sinner" man who yells his (Christian) faith down a megaphone in the middle of Oxford Circus every single day is seen as a local landmark, if a slightly irritating one once he starts going on about how buying stuff on a Sunday is a highway to hell.

I don't believe in thrusting religion down people's necks, but we accept the marketing of coffee, newspapers and shampoo samples readily enough on the basis that people can take it or leave it, so why ban people expounding on their religion in the same way, as long as they're not being aggressive or harrassing people?

On a similar theme, I got handed a flyer today about a man who's riding a horse from Texas to Jerusalem (the tricky bit with the ocean wasn't explained) in the name of Jesus, to spread the Gospel. Fair dos, I thought, before turning my thoughts to how he was going to get the horse across continents.

All of which, plus the fact that it was late and I was tired and lacking in the brain power necessary to sling a sentence together, let alone make a point about religion, left me thinking that I should probably re-write the post, or at least some of the post, and actually make clear my thoughts on the matter, which, exploding blog clients aside, I'd hitherto failed to do.

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This will only apply to Ubuntu users (server or desktop). Anyone who's not one can probably look away now.

An urgent Ubuntu Security Notice, USN-612-1, has just been put out. The full notice is here.

An extract of the salient details:

A weakness has been discovered in the random number generator used by OpenSSL on Debian and Ubuntu systems. As a result of this weakness, certain encryption keys are much more common than they should be, such that an attacker could guess the key through a brute-force attack given minimal knowledge of the system. This particularly affects the use of encryption keys in OpenSSH, OpenVPN and SSL certificates.

So, update and upgrade your systems now and regenerate your key pairs.

Mur Lafferty writes:

I am thrilled to announce that I have signed a contract to release Playing For Keeps with Swarm Press! Swarm is an imprint of Permuted, the small horror press, and is launching this summer with three superhero titles, PFK being one. (For podcast fans, Matthew Wayne Selznick's Brave Men Run is another title coming out from Swarm.)

This is fantastic news for Mur and for everyone that's followed PFK via I Should Be Writing since its inception.

Congratulations Mur! I'd raise a glass of gin in your honour, except I can't stand the stuff, frankly. Oh well. There's a bottle of single malt somewhere that'll do as a substitute.

The headline sounded promising: "'Respect atheists', says Cardinal." Unfortunately, and somewhat predictably, the story itself is a little different from what the headline suggests:

"I want to encourage people of faith to regard those without faith with deep esteem because the hidden God is active in their lives as well as in the lives of those who believe."

Which sounds less like what I'd hoped for (though I don't truly know what I really hoped for) and more like what I should really have expected, which is "love thy neighbour." You wouldn't think that was bad, and to be fair I don't, entirely, but I dislike the way it's framed.

There was also this:

God is not a "fact in the world" as though God could be treated as "one thing among other things to be empirically investigated" and affirmed or denied on the "basis of observation", said Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor.

Which, well, is one of those pieces of reasoning that I find to be more than a bit ridiculous, especially when said out loud. The problem is, of course, that it amounts to an argument from personal credulity, which is also know as an argument from ignorance.

The thing that really rankled me, though, for I'm hardly surprised to hear any of the above from dear old Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor, is the way the headline was written.

And to tell the truth, I'd much rather that he'd said "You should treat atheists and agnostics with respect. Because, like you, they're human beings."