Where can I find elementary's source code... for science?

Question

I'm a student at University of Wyoming (UWyo), USA, studying the source (and difference in source) for Linux packages.

I'm interested in what elementary OS's source list looks like. Specifically, I can usually pull enough information from:

sudo cat /var/lib/apt/lists/* | grep Vcs-Git | awk '{print $2}' > ~/apt-sources

I'm curious if elementary has any unique locations for where its source is maintained (other than it and the contributor's GitHub accounts?), and if it's plausible for UWyo's computer science department to download it.

And, while I'm at it, has anyone ever tried to do this for .rpm?

Answer 1

The source code of components the elementary team is maintaining is not hosted via git (neither GitHub nor any other git server), it's hosted on Launchpad which is using bzr (bazaar). As you can see, following the link, all of the source code elementary is maintaining is open to the public and available under some version of the GNU General Public License. Therefore you're allowed to download and redistribute the code (and build binaries from this code), as long as you're following the restrictions of the corresponding license.

If you're interested in the code of a certain elementary OS component (as the link above is pretty cluttered), you can follow the links here to the separate projects. Most of elementary OS' projects have .tgz files available in the sidebar on the right (titled "Downloads"). These are the latest stable release tarballs. If you're more interested in pulling code via bzr, you should take a look at the code page (for example Pantheon Terminal) - There is a code branch which is part of the Freya series. That branch contains the stable releases for the corresponding project. You don't want to pull from trunk, because that's the branch containing active development - Which might be unstable and/or untested.