Open source goodness
Posted by Jorge Bernal March 15, 2006
Corey, I totally agree with Launchpad is hurting Ubuntu except for this:
PS. This really has nothing to do with the license (or lack there of) that Launchpad is under. No, really. The UI would suck just as hard if it was open source.
If Launchpad code were under a free license (or at least its code was available), I’d have sent lots of patches for some issues. And I want to believe I’m not the only one.
I agree the LP developers are a great staff, but IMHO they are too few people to fix all the issues. Also, there is mpt, who is doing a great job on usability for launchpad, but only one person for the entire beast?
The problem may be to have started using launchpad too early. Bugzilla is another beast and has its flaws, but it works for a lot of projects. CVS for translations may not be the most user-friendly way to translate software, but GNOME gets translated to a lot of languages each six months (and with really high quality).
Willing to make an enterprise-ready and user-friendly distribution, while using it as a guinea pig for a new (untested before) infrastructure… not a good idea folks.
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Corey, I totally agree with Launchpad is hurting Ubuntu except for this:
If Launchpad code were under a free license (or at least its code was available), I’d have sent lots of patches for some issues. And I want to believe I’m not the only one.
I agree the LP developers are a great staff, but IMHO they are too few people to fix all the issues. Also, there is mpt, who is doing a great job on usability for launchpad, but only one person for the entire beast?
The problem may be to have started using launchpad too early. Bugzilla is another beast and has its flaws, but it works for a lot of projects. CVS for translations may not be the most user-friendly way to translate software, but GNOME gets translated to a lot of languages each six months (and with really high quality).
Willing to make an enterprise-ready and user-friendly distribution, while using it as a guinea pig for a new (untested before) infrastructure… not a good idea folks.
I agree with you but what is done is done, we cannot revert to bugzilla.
There’s no need to say “We should have…” but we need to find some “To solve the problem, we should do this now !”
I suggest :
1. Open the code, at least to every Ubuntu contributor
2. Make a Launchpad improvement team who would make concrete and precise suggestions.
This team would be highly non-technical (no code involved) and will have the job to triage features request and bug about LP to make a clear roadmap and plan of what the developpers have to do.
I forgot to say that I’m very happy to see I’m not alone to give up with bug triaging in LP..
Development tools are a very important part of a product.
I find it hard to understand that a project that believes so strongly in open source and free software base their development tools on a closed source product.
This needs to change.
FWIW, I’m not doing “usability for Launchpad”, though of course I offer my opinions on it.
My job is more about cleaning up dodgy HTML and CSS. Launchpad’s interface is currently designed by Mark Shuttleworth.