Comment 3 for bug 786212

It's not a matter of license, but a matter of whether it feels like they care about your freedom. Take for example these parts taken from the Free Software Definition:

"The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1)."

"Freedom 1 includes the freedom to use your changed version in place of the original. If the program is delivered in a product designed to run someone else's modified versions but refuse to run yours — a practice known as “tivoization” or “lockdown”, or (in its practitioners' perverse terminology) as “secure boot” — freedom 1 becomes a theoretical fiction rather than a practical freedom. This is not sufficient. In other words, these binaries are not free software even if the source code they are compiled from is free. "

LaunchPad is clearly a dirty corner case: The wording doesn't clearly say it breaks the rules, but in practice you can't run your own instance. It's not WONTFIX, it is WONTCARE. LaunchPad team could easily make it easy to run, just like so many other services- but clearly they don't want you to run an instance, and their decisions make it so difficult nobody does it in practice.

If you're fine with Canonical not caring about decentralization and true in-practice software freedom, that's fine. But I do care, and I want to work with people who are real friends, not ones who pretend to be. How can someone call their distro UBUNTU and still provide the code in a way *intentionally* making it practically impossible to run an instance?

(By the way, Karl, aren't you the writer of Producing Open Source Software? Great book.)