Canonical Releases Launchpad Source Code
by Lisa Hoover - Jul. 21, 2009Comments (0)- Related Blog Posts
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When Mike Gunderloy wrote about Canonical's software and development platform, Launchpad, last year, he said even though it wasn't the only hosting service in town, "[Its] features... especially the API and sharing bugs, make it a strong choice moving forward." Canonical's announcement today that it has opened Launchpad's source code puts another checkmark in the column of reasons software projects may want to consider using it for their hosting and collaboration needs.
Though Launchpad isn't the only software forge to share the code running its backend, it's certainly among the most well-known. SourceForge, GitHub and other large hosting services haven't made that leap yet, so this move by Canonical is sure to appeal to FOSS purists who want no association whatsoever with proprietary software or code.
"Launchpad is designed to accelerate collaboration between open source projects," said Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth in a prepared statement. "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... 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.”
Opening Launchpad's source code wasn't something that happened overnight. In fact, Canonical began the process back in 2007 when it released Launchpad's first component, a Python-based database communication tool. Though some members of the FOSS community have criticized the company for not moving to release all the code more quickly, Shuttleworth said it would eventually happen in due course. If the chatter on Twitter today is any indication, Canonical made a lot of open source developers pretty happy by taking the wrapping paper off Launchpad and handing it over to the free software community.
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