Canonical opens Launchpad

An open-source irony has long been that Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, used its own closed-source software development platform, Launchpad, to create Ubuntu and other open-source programs. On July 21st, though, Canonical opened Launchpad's code under the GPLv3.

Launchpad is a set of integrated tools that support collaboration and community formation. These include a team management tool, a bug tracker, code hosting, translations, a blueprint tracker, and an answer tracker.

Launchpad went public in late 2007. With it, developers have been able to host and share code using its integrated Bazaar version control system. Besides all the usual development goodies that you get with similar projects such as SourceForge Launchpad enables developers to, as Canonical puts it, "support each other's efforts across different project hosting services - essentially making Launchpad a social network with a purpose."

From where I sit, Launchpad's best feature is its bug-tracker. Unlike other bug-trackers, Launchpad's system lets you track separate conversations about the same bug in external project bug trackers. So, for example, you can easily see if a big has already been reported in another online development or bug-tracking system such as Bugzilla, the Mozilla Foundation's bug-tracker; Roundup; SourceForge; and the Debian Bug Tracking System.

I rarely program anymore, but even now, the idea of having an easy way to find out what's bugs have already been found and documented, and best of all, already fixed, makes my mouth water. I hate, hate re-inventing the wheel and if I were a full-time developer this one feature alone would have me switching all my projects to Launchpad.

In a statement, Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical's CEO, said "Launchpad is designed to accelerate collaboration between open source projects. Collaboration is the engine of innovation in free software development, and our intent in creating Launchpad is to support 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 fulfills a long term intention to give the users of Launchpad the ability to improve the service they use every day."

He's right. And, he's not just saying that because it's his baby. In another statement, Jay Pipes, Core Developer on Sun's lightweight DBMS Drizzle Project, said, "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."

Impressive, very impressive, considering that Sun has little reason to love Linux in general.

You don't have to believe any of us though. You can try it for yourself. The Launchpad site hosts open-source projects for free, and closed-source projects can use the service for a fee. Or, now, you can of course get Launchpad's code and run it for yourself.

The way I see it though, using Launchpad the service remotely may be the better bet for most developers rather than running your own local instance of it. Most of Launchpad's virtues come from its combination of multiple-project integration and social networking. Since the Launchpad site already has all those connections up and running, it seems to me that using Launchpad as a service is the quickest way for you to start getting useful work out of Launchpad.

That said, it's really good to see Launchpad's code finally out and available. It always struck me as more than a little odd that Ubuntu would rely on closed source for its development platform.