Battery Status is a project for GNOME, that shows information about laptop battery state. It comes with a lot of additional features, so usual icon of GNOME Power Manager can be removed from Notification/Indicator Area.

London July 21, 2009: Canonical, the founder of the Ubuntu project, announced today that it has open-sourced the code that runs Launchpad, the software development and collaboration platform used by tens of thousands of developers.

Launchpad is used to build Ubuntu and thousands of other projects, and its users can now participate directly in the development of Launchpad itself.

The icons/indicators can be removed by removing two packages: indicator-me and indicator-messages.

Canonical's most famous project is Ubuntu.  But Launchpad, another of the company's major endeavors, has been around just as long - even though many casual Ubuntu users may not be aware of its existence.  Here's a look at the value Launchpad offers, and where it fits into Canonical's present and future.

Launchpad is a suite of tools that help people and teams to work together on free software. It is hosted at Launchpad.net by Canonical, Ltd, and [now] it is open source itself, licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3.

Mark Shuttleworth: "In the case of Launchpad, we do view you as a co-owner of the data, so the resolution of this problem is important to us. [...] Affero GPL is a strong candidate for the front line of thinking on the subject, and that's what I am inclined to use when we publish Launchpad's source code. [...] I do agree that Affero is a better option than the straightforward GPL.

"Last week, I asked Karl Fogel, Canonical's newly hired Launchpad Ombudsman, if Launchpad will use the AGPLv3. His eyes said “yes” but his words were something like: "Canonical hasn't announced the license choice yet".

Early this week, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, will be releasing its Launchpad Personal Package Archive service, a new way for developers to build and publish packages of their code, documentation, artwork, themes and other contributions to the Ubuntu environment on desktop, server and now mobile environments.

A few more improvements, and a possible move to "project" status - your opinion will decide!