Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/04/21/canonical-sign-on.html

I wrote 15 months ago
thanking
Canonical for their release of Launchpad. However, in the interim,
a part of the necessary codebase was made proprietary, namely the
authentication system used in the canonical instance of Launchpad hosted
by Canonical. (Yes, I still insist on using canonical in the canonical
way despite the company name making it confusing. :).
I added this fact to
my list of reasons of abandoning Ubuntu and other Canonical
products.

Fortunately, I’ve now removed this reason from the list of reasons I
switched back to Debian from Ubuntu,
since Jono
Bacon announced release of this code today. According
to Jono, this release means that Launchpad and its
dependencies are again fully Free Software. This is a step forward.
And, I did promise many people at Canonical that I’d make a point about
thanking them for doing Free Software releases when they do them, since
I do make a point of calling them out about negative things they do.

Like any mixed proprietary/Free Software company, there is tons more to
be released. I remain most concerned about UbuntuOne’s server side
code, but I very much hope this release today marks a bounce-back for
Canonical to its roots in the 100% Free Software world.