Canonical releases source code for developers

LONDON, UK: 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.

Used to build Ubuntu and thousands of other projects, developers can now directly contribute to Launchpad itself

Using Launchpad, developers host and share code for free, using the Bazaar version control system integrated into Launchpad. Translators can collaborate on translations across many different projects, and end-users identify bugs affecting one or more projects so developers can then triage and resolve those bugs.

Contributors can write, propose, and manage software specifications. In addition, Launchpad erases barriers to collaboration and enables people to support each other's efforts across different project hosting services, essentially making Launchpad a social network with a purpose. Launchpad has everything software projects, open source or not, need to be successful.

"Launchpad accelerates collaboration between open source projects," said Canonical founder and CEO Mark Shuttleworth. "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."

Jay Pipes, core developer on the Drizzle Project at Sun Microsystems said, "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."

Launchpad hosts open source projects for free, but closed source projects use the service for a fee. This means that projects can utilize the features that Launchpad provides but do not need to share code if that is not desirable. The privacy features are currently in beta, and will be added to the commercial service as these become available.