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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?

I have had various reactions to my wearing the above at UDS today:

• From Bacon himself: "Oh. My. God."
• From Julian Edwards: "Wh?"
• From Dave Murphy: "I hope you're not joining the Cult of Bacon.
• From one apparently insane UDS delegate: "Sexy"
• From two UDS delegates (including the aforementioned insane one): "Can I get one of those?"

The world is a little bit weirder than it was yesterday. Especially, I suspect, if you're Jono Bacon.

I've started uploading photos of UDS Intrepid in Prague. Let joy be unconfined. You can find the photos here and everyone's photos here.

I'll actually write a blog post about this tomorrow.

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.

Due to enormous demand the Canonical shop is now offering a second printing of the Hardy Heron T-Shirt, this time on sand-coloured cotton.

From the shop:

Due to unprecedented demand, we are producing a second edition Hardy Heron t-shirt. This edition is very similar to the limited edition t-shirt in design, but rather than including the heron image from the wallpaper of the beta release of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, it includes the heron which is featured on the current Ubuntu desktop wallpaper (a slight difference in the position of the colours used, but different enough to keep the first chocolate coloured 500 as limited edition). Plus this is a sand coloured t-shirt, which is 100% cotton. Can't wait until they arrive? Pre-order yours now.

Since I managed not to order a first edition version I've put in my preorder for the second. Sadly, it won't arrive before I go to UDS in a couple of weeks, but I'll survive. I have another, more sekrit T-shirt that I'll be taking with me, of which more, doubtless, anon...