In response, the developers stated that they aimed to eventually release it under a free software license, but that it could potentially take years.

[10] On 22 July 2008, Mark Shuttleworth announced at OSCON that the complete source code would be released within the next twelve months.

Calls for an open API to be released were aided by projects like Leonov that resorted to screen scraping to get data from Launchpad.

In December 2008, Canonical announced that the source code to the Launchpad website would be released under a free software license by 21 July 2009.

[17][18] However, on 21 July 2009, the software was released under the AGPLv3 (a fully free license specifically for web services),[19] including the two components (Codehosting and Soyuz) that were initially planned to remain proprietary.