Ubuntu to unveil new version of its Launchpad community next week

Computerworld - PORTLAND, Ore. -- A year after creating an online open-source software development community to take on SourceForge.net and other rivals, the development team at Ubuntu Linux will be the first to admit that it still has a long way to go to achieve the popularity of its competitors.

Ubuntu's beta community, called Launchpad, was unveiled last July and has seen a huge increase in the number of open-source projects under development, from 1,500 projects at the start to about 7,000 today.

Although that's a sizable increase, it still pales compared to the number of open-source projects hosted on its more popular and well-known rival, SourceForge.net, where about 150,000 open-source projects are available today.

For users, Launchpad offers an open-source software hosting and development collaboration Web site similar to SourceForge.net, but there's one big difference according to Ubuntu -- code and other resources posted on the site can be shared back and forth across all the open-source projects that are under way there.

That, said project manager Christian Reis, makes Launchpad a more collaborative environment for projects that could eventually refine the way open-source software is developed.

Reis, known in the open-source community as "Kiko," talked about the scheduled debut next week of the new Version 2.0 of Launchpad yesterday at the 10th annual O'Reilly Open Source Convention. The new version will be announced next week by Canonical Ltd., the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu Linux.

On other development sites, he said, "there's not a lot of communication between" open-source projects. "Launchpad, as part of its core strategy, seeks to encourage sharing. This is where we think it makes a big difference for us."

The biggest open-source development project on Launchpad is Ubuntu Linux itself, he said, including management of packages, bug tracking and foreign language translations.

And even though the number of projects hosted on Launchpad has grown, Ubuntu has learned a lesson in the project's first year. That lesson, he said, is that "it's very difficult to break new ground" in the project development arena because of the entrenched nature of SourceForge.net's community. Most of Ubuntu's efforts so far have been by word of mouth, but that's a slow process.

Other large-scale open-source projects are also coming aboard the Launchpad community. MySQL AB began using Launchpad about a month ago for its development, he said.

With Launchpad, developers don't need to get prior permission to contribute code or create a new direction in a project, unlike traditional open-source software development models. Project leaders still ultimately have final say on what does and doesn't make it into the final code, but individual developers have more leeway in trying new ideas and getting feedback from others.