Ubuntu Launchpad to go open source

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.