Why bzr and launchpad? launchpad is open source

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Why bzr and launchpad? Bzr AND Launchpad are open source.

launchpad: open source
github: closed source
sourceforge: closed source (was open source in the past)
bitbucket: closed source
googlecode: closed source

You can submit changes to launchpad at: dev.launchpad.net. As well as (submit launchpad bugs) and feature requests against it if you don't want to make the patch yourself.

When there is a good open source alternative, I always choose the good open source option. I initially had problems with bzr a couple of years ago... but it has been quite good to me over the last couple of months. So I'm moving over all of my projects from other version control hosting services to launchpad.

Of course bzr and launchpad are also written in python (with selected optional C optimizations), so that makes for happy hacking :)


update: reported a bug here about the 'can not find source code easily on launchpad' issue. Any other issues with launchpad?

Comments

Unknown said…
Gitorious: http://gitorious.org/gitorious
10:39 AM
Dirkjan Ochtman said…
Mercurial includes hgwebdir, which makes it pretty easy to setup repository hosting (though it's certainly not as full-featured as launchpad -- but I consider that a feature).
10:42 AM
Damien Lebrun said…
I never can find my around Launchpad unlike most of the alternatives you mentioned.
11:59 AM
Panos Laganakos said…
Indeed, launchpad is massive, which makes it hard to navigate around.

If you invest the time to learn it though, it pays off.

Still I agree, it shouldn't have such a steep learning curve.
12:04 PM
René Dudfield said…
Indeed, launchpad makes it hard to find source code for example. That's the main thing I struggle with. Is there anything else?

... off to file a bug report.
12:24 PM
Unknown said…
As others mentioned, gitorious is OSS and hgwebdir makes it utterly trivial to host your hg repos (probably one of the reasons why github is a juggernaut compared to bitbucket).

As far as launchpad goes, it might be open-source but it's also mostly a stinker. It's overly complex, the various parts are very badly integrated (if at all), it's utterly terrible as far as browsing code goes (hides the actual code behind half a dozen clicks, and the code and diff viewing section looks and feels very, very bad), some sections (blueprints) are completely useless, ...

And of course, it's tightly integrated with bazaar which itself is pretty much the worst "modern dvcs" available on just about any metric you can care for.
12:25 PM
brian said…
Ironic to see this post on a blog run by Blogger, which is not open source, to my knowledge. It also implies that you have a GMail account, which is also not open source.
1:15 PM
René Dudfield said…
Brian, indeed. Touché.

Would be good to switch this blog to a wordpress blog instead... and I have my own email hosted too of course.

cu.
1:19 PM
Dan Villiom Podlaski Christiansen said…
I believe it's worth pointing out that Bitbucket, for example, also have a public bug tracker. I don't see what value there is in having access to the Launchpad source code, unless you either plan on modifying the code or running it yourself.

In my opinion, a tool should be measured by its merits as a tool; whether it allows you to do what you want to do. Writing a good tool is often expensive, and wanting to recover some of that cost seems quite reasonable to me.

Yes, Launchpad is both free and “Free”. Unfortunately, though, you get what you pay for…
6:07 PM
Anonymous said…
For those who said Launchpad is hard to navigate around, file a bug about what you find is hard. The Launchpad team (like the rest of Canonical) is becoming more and more focused on usability as well as features. Let's help make the learning curve less steep.
7:12 PM
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