This surely comes as good news to all Ubuntu fans out there. [Canonical][2] today made Launchpad open source under the GPLv3 license. [As promised][3].
If you didn’t already know, Launchpad is a project hosting and collaboration platform for software which provides access through its web interface or through its APIs. Users simply need an account to enjoy the suite of services provided by the then close sourced platform. Bug tracking, code hosting, code review, packaging, translation and community support. Everyone has their project space and the ability to easily distribute their packages through [PPA][4]s.
Canonical has no plans to package Launchpad as of now for easy deployment. However, you can still [download][5] the source and compile it as always. Also, Launchpad will only run on Hardy and Jaunty so getting it to run on other Linux distros will certainly require some extra work.
New versions of Launchpad are released every month, in return users never miss out on new features. With the community being able to contribute now, development’s going to pick up and we can most certainly hope for a flood of new features to come out of Launchpad moving forward.
The Launchpad platform is something most of Canonical’s competitors don’t currently provide to their users. This puts it ahead of the competition. openSUSE is the pretty close with their excellent build service platform but the general user base is smaller.
Follow the Launchpad community on IRC in channel [#launchpad-dev][6] on irc.freenode.net or at [dev.launchpad.net][7].
Source: [Canonical][2] | [Ubuntu][8]
[1]: /wp-content/uploads/2009/07/launchpad-logo-and-name.png) [2]: http://blog.canonical.com/?p=192 [3]: http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2008/07/mark-shuttleworth-launchpad-to-be-open-source-in-12-months.ars [4]: https://help.launchpad.net/Packaging/PPA [5]: https://dev.launchpad.net/ [6]: irc://irc.freenode.net/#launchpad-dev [7]: http://dev.launchpad.net/ [8]: http://www.ubuntu.com/news/canonical-open-sources-launchpad