Launchpad Code is Now Open Source, Canonical Announces
Launchpad, the code hosting and collaboration platform developed and maintained by Canonical, has gone open-source as of today the 21st of July, the company behind the popular Ubuntu project announced. To be more precise, the code that runs Launchpad has been open-sourced – and the reason provided by Canonical for doing so is “to encourage innovation.”
Founder and CEO of Canonical, Mark Shuttleworth comments: “Launchpad accelerates collaboration between open source projects. Collaboration is the engine of innovation in free software development, and Launchpad supports one of the key strengths of free software compared with the traditional proprietary development process. Projects that are hosted on Launchpad are immediately connected to every other project hosted there in a way that makes it easy to collaborate on code, translations, bug fixes and feature design across project boundaries. Rather than hosting individual projects, we host a massive and connected community that collaborates together across many projects. Making Launchpad itself open source gives users the ability to improve the service they use every day.”
Developers can host and share code from all sorts of sources thanks to the Bazaar version control system that is integrated in Launchpad. They can also seamlessly triage and resolve bugs that end users identified. Translators can more easily collaborate on translation across different projects, and contributors can write, propose and manage software specifications. Open source projects are hosted free of charge by Launchpad; closed source projects use Launchpad free of charge as well.
Jay Pipes, Core Developer on the Drizzle Project at Sun Microsystems comments on Launchpad’s usefulness: “Since the Drizzle project’s start in April, 2008, its community and contributors have used Launchpad as a platform for managing code and development tasks, and as an efficient method of communication between community members regarding bugs, workflow, code reviews, and more. Launchpad makes it easy to take all the disparate pieces of software development – bug reporting, source control, task management and code reviews – and glue them together with an easy-to-use interface that emphasizes public and open community discourse.”
Founder and CEO of Canonical, Mark Shuttleworth comments: “Launchpad accelerates collaboration between open source projects. Collaboration is the engine of innovation in free software development, and Launchpad supports one of the key strengths of free software compared with the traditional proprietary development process. Projects that are hosted on Launchpad are immediately connected to every other project hosted there in a way that makes it easy to collaborate on code, translations, bug fixes and feature design across project boundaries. Rather than hosting individual projects, we host a massive and connected community that collaborates together across many projects. Making Launchpad itself open source gives users the ability to improve the service they use every day.”
Developers can host and share code from all sorts of sources thanks to the Bazaar version control system that is integrated in Launchpad. They can also seamlessly triage and resolve bugs that end users identified. Translators can more easily collaborate on translation across different projects, and contributors can write, propose and manage software specifications. Open source projects are hosted free of charge by Launchpad; closed source projects use Launchpad free of charge as well.
Jay Pipes, Core Developer on the Drizzle Project at Sun Microsystems comments on Launchpad’s usefulness: “Since the Drizzle project’s start in April, 2008, its community and contributors have used Launchpad as a platform for managing code and development tasks, and as an efficient method of communication between community members regarding bugs, workflow, code reviews, and more. Launchpad makes it easy to take all the disparate pieces of software development – bug reporting, source control, task management and code reviews – and glue them together with an easy-to-use interface that emphasizes public and open community discourse.”
