Launchpad’s “Secret Sauce”!

I noticed on Launchpad’s site that the plans to open source the service is scheduled to be completed by the middle of 2009. The only thing that struck me as odd was the fact that there are components that Canonical see as their “secret sauce”. Those components will not be open sourced.

It makes you wonder how a company with a business plan of servicing freely acquired software, can justify writing their own software and choosing to keep some closed because that is their “secret sauce”. What if the Linux kernel decided that their was a subsystem that was their way of keeping the competition at bay and they would only release, let’s say, the scheduler as binary only. This just doesn’t seem to jive with the spirit of community and giving back and such.

As always just my 2 cents worth.