14 DAY TRIAL // Today, July 21st, Canonical announced a few hours ago that Launchpad, the popular collaboration and software development platform, has been open-sourced. Released a few years ago, the Launchpad project is today the home of thousands of projects and it is also used to build the Ubuntu operating system. As of today, anyone can join the Launchpad community in order to help improve it!
"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." Mark Shuttleworth, CEO and founder of Canonical, stated in the press release.
"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," he added.
Launchpad is a collaboration and software hosting platform that uses the Bazaar version control system to share/host code from various sources. With Launchpad, translation can be done across various projects and reported/identified bugs can be easily triaged and resolved.
Jay Pipes, the core developer of the Drizzle Project at Sun Microsystems, Inc. says that, since April 2008, when their project started, Launchpad has been used on a daily basis by its contributors and community, for development tasks and to manage the source code. Pipes says that Launchpad has proved to be an extraordinary communication method between members of the community.
"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." - Jay Pipes said in the press release.
Launchpad has everything open-source software projects, and even closed ones, need in order to be successful! Take the Launchpad tour here.