[OpenFontLibrary] LaunchPad going 100% Affero

[Dave Crossland]

2009/1/31 Daniel Glassey <dglassey at gmail.com>:
>
>100% it is not.

My bad. You are quite right, they seem to be withholding the IMPORTANT parts :-)

I take this at face value - they have written some very nice code for
pulling in a vanilla CVS and turning it into a slick binary release
cycle * and don't want to publish this because they fear their
competitors - ie, Red Hat - will take it and stop them from stealing
their customers. Once they have the business operations refined enough
that having the software won't give RH et al too much easy advantage
over them (such as if RH develops its own similar thing) they'll
publish it. Similar to Sun and Java and GNU Classpath, that bit.

* I recently wrote (http://typophile.com/node/54103) that a "free
program has a life cycle from an cutting edge, experimental sideline
source code version, to a "mainline" source code version, to an
experimental "alpha" pre-compiled binary version, to a testing "beta"
binary version, to a stable "release" binary version, to being
obsolete." It seems to me that Launchpad automates this, and
integrates issue tracking, translations, and so on too. Issue tracking
is useful for fonts; translations less so, although still relevant for
the metadata stuff.