Canonical open-sources Launchpad

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 23 Jul 2009 at 09:56

Canonical has open-sourced the code for its project-hosting service, dubbed Launchpad.

Launchpad offers collaboration tools, bug tracking, forums and localisation support for a multitude of open-source projects including Ubuntu and MySQL.

Canonical offers these tools to all open-source projects for free, however, thus far the technology underpinning the service has remained proprietary acting as a deterrent.

Canonical promised to open source the tools in 2008 and despite warning the project may be delayed has managed to hit its deadline on schedule. As a further boon to the community, the company has also released the code to a number of tools it had initially intended to keep proprietary including the package management component.

"I'm very happy to announce that today we open-sourced Launchpad. This is the fulfilment of a commitment made a year ago, as well as an experiment in involving the community in the development of a hosted service," notes Canonical's Karl Fogel on the official Canonical blog.

"Although we previously announced that we'd be holding back two components (codehosting and soyuz), we changed our minds: they are included??"all the code is open," he concludes.