Ubuntu Launchpad to go open source

by Matt Asay January 13, 2009 7:37 AM PST

commentary

Just seven days after Bastille Day, France's day for celebrating its freedom, Ubuntu will unfetter Launchpad as an open-source project, as announced on the Launchpad news blog.

Launchpad is an open-source project-hosting service that promises to make it "easy to share code, bug reports, translations, and ideas across projects." It's a great service--so robust that MySQL moved its project hosting to Launchpad in early 2008--but has been proprietary, and will remain so until it goes open source on July 21.

I'm a big fan of Launchpad and expect that opening up its source code will take the project in interesting, unforeseen directions. That's the power of open source and a good indicator of Mark Shuttleworth's commitment to open source.

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About The Open Road

Matt Asay is chief operating officer at Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux operating system. Prior to Canonical, Matt was general manager of the Americas division and vice president of business development at Alfresco, an open-source applications company. Matt brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay.

Ubuntu Launchpad to go open source

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