A launchpad for better open-source code

. . . keeping an eye on the penguin

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Apr. 02, 2007

Some ideas are so sensible that you feel like slapping yourself in the face for not thinking of them yourself. Take, for instance, the just-released Launchpad.net 1.0. The sensible idea? When programmers on different projects work with common, open-source code, enable them to find and fix problems together.

As Homer Simpson would say, "Doh!"

There are plenty of online open-source development sites and communities such as SourceForge.net, CollabNet, and FreshMeat.net. However, none of these make it easy for a programmer on project Aardvark to work on a shared problem with the Mice Library with a developer on project Zebra. In fact, usually the programmers don't even know that they have a problem in common.

As Mark Shuttleworth, who's CEO of Canonical Ltd., the company behind Ubuntu, explained, "For a bug, say, in Firefox being used on Red Hat Linux, the bug trackers may be working on the same problem with Firefox on Ubuntu or Solaris. If they don't communicate, there's a lot of wasted time and effort there ... Launchpad solves this."

Launchpad is made up of 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. It does its bug stomping management magic by trying to link separate conversations in external project bug trackers, such as Bugzilla, Roundup, Sourceforge, and the Debian BTS.

Ubuntu has already been using Launchpad for some time, so we already know that it can do the job. Now, Shuttleworth is inviting everyone to give it a try.

If I were still doing development, I'd get my project up on Launchpad in a New York minute. You can register your project at the site's project page.

-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

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