AGPL in the wild

Canonical’s project hosting site and bugtracking Launchpad has been around since the early Ubuntu days. Many Canonical projects, including Launchpad itself, are hosted here. Initially Mark Shuttleworth rejected calls to open source the project. However, the community’s chagrin persisted and the software was eventually released under AGPL v3 in 2009. The site is now more popular than ever, and we haven’t seen a proliferation of almost-but-notquite compatible Launchpad clones in the wild, so it’s fair to say that this was a good decision. It is home to some high-profile projects, such as Linux Mint, MariaDB and elementary OS.

Massive open online course (MOOC) provider EdX has been entirely open source since 2013, allowing anyone from anywhere to study anything, in many cases for free. Thanks to the platform’s licensing, educational institutions around the world are now offering their online initiatives. The IMF uses the edX platform to offer economics and finance courses. The Internet Archive’s Open Library project aims to create “one web page for every book ever published” and provides access to many public domain texts, as well as a system for borrowing eBooks. This, together with efforts such as Project Gutenberg, provide a nice alternative to Google and Amazon’s bookish offerings.

One of the most promising projects in the field of artificial intelligence is the OpenCog framework, licensed under the GNU AGPL. Whether or not you believe Ray Kurzweil’s prophecies about the coming of ‘the singularity’, it’s good to know that there are free platforms on which we can architect our robotic demise.