Canonical has released open source code for the Launchpad software development and collaboration platform that it provides for Ubuntu application development. Based on the Bazaar version control system, Launchpad offers features for collaborative application development, bug tracking, translations, and more, says the company.
By open-sourcing Launchpad, which debuted in 2007, Ubuntu users now have "the ability to improve the service they use every day," said Canonical founder and CEO Mark Shuttleworth, in a statement. According to Canonical, Launchpad is used by tens of thousands of developers, not only for Ubuntu, but for "thousands of other projects."
Launchpad lets developers host and share code from numerous sources using the Bazaar distributed version control system, which is integrated into Launchpad. Translators can collaborate across many different projects, and end-users can identify bugs affecting one or more projects, enabling developers to more easily triage and resolve the problems, says Canonical. Launchpad is also said to enable contributors to write, propose, and manage software specifications, as well as work across different project hosting services via both a web interface and its own APIs.
According to Canonical, in addition to hosting open source projects for free, Launchpad is offered to closed source projects for a fee. The privacy features required to do so are currently in beta, however.
Stated Jay Pipes, Core Developer on the Drizzle Project at Sun Microsystems, which has been using Launchpad for over a year, "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."
Stated Canonical founder and CEO Mark Shuttleworth, "Launchpad accelerates collaboration between open source projects. 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."
