One of the biggest tech levers that fuels the Ubuntu community is the Launchpad platform. It’s a collaborative platform that integrates with Ubuntu’s Bazaar (Bzr) version control system to let developers share and host code.
Ironically, though Launchpad is a system used to help open source developers build applications, Launchpad itself was not open source – until today that is.
Launchpad is now available under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3. Though Launchpad is now open source, Ubuntu is not providing a packaged version for easy download (yet).
“Since we do new rollouts of Launchpad directly from
Bazaar branches anyway, that’s how we distribute the source code to
developers,” the Launchpad documentation states. “There are no plans to package Launchpad, its deployment is
quite complex.
It’s also currently only available for Ubuntu Linux, so if you wanted
to try and install Launchpad on a different distro – you’re on your own.
