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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?

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...

You'll remember that I said, a while back, that I think the new Hardy Heron desktop wallpaper would make a good T-shirt?

Well whaddaya know; thanks to Kat Kinnie of the Canonical marketing team there is now just such an item. I think I may be purchasing one of those...

If you're one of the people that's here for the technical guff rather than the writing or photography guff, you'll be interested (you will be interested) to note that registration for Ubuntu Live 2008 is now open.

From t'website:

Ubuntu Live is a vibrant and important gathering of IT professionals, government and business leaders, educators, community leaders, enterprise and business users. The conference brings together the people who deploy and manage Ubuntu in organizations, companies offering services and solutions based on Ubuntu, customers of those services, users of Ubuntu, and the folks who build Ubuntu and other key open source software.

So there you go. I have no idea whether I'll be attending yet. There will be some talking about Launchpad as far as I can tell but whether that'll need me to be there I don't know (it's the company's decision at the end of the day). Still, last year's event was apparently tremendous fun, so if you've got the means and the desire, get yourself registered.

As has by now been announced more-or-less left, right, center, top, bottom and everywhere else in the universe, Ubuntu Brainstorm went live today.

The idea behind Brainstorm is pretty simple and yet immensely powerful. It offers a place for Ubuntu users to post their ideas about how Ubuntu can be improved: new features, tweaks... just about anything can be listed on Brainstorm as a means of suggesting what you think can be improved about Ubuntu. Moreover, other users can vote for (or against) the ideas that have been posted.

The upshot is that the Ubuntu community, QA team and development teams have an excellent source of ideas for things-that-need-work. Obviously there have been Launchpad bug list to go off before now but the thing about bug lists is that the majority of the things on them are bugs; the feature ideas, if any, have been hard to find as a result.

Henrik Omma, who, I think, was the first to announce Brainstorm (being that it's his baby), demonstrated it to the Launchpad Bugs team when we were sprinting in London a few weeks back. It looked cool then, it looks cooler now with live data on it and already having seen a decent flow of users. I'm sure it's going to rock.

If you're a digg user you can digg the announcement of Brainstorm here.