Canonical has been working on Launchpad for about two years now, and probably a few more behind closed doors before that. It's a dashboarding and monitoring system for running software development projects.

My only complaint with the software, historically, has been its relative slowness: it's Web-based and can sometimes take a second or two to build a page. While the platform has certainly sped up over the years, I now have no excuse to complain anymore, as the software is open source as of yesterday.

Now you too can run Launchpad to control your internal development projects. It's got everything you're probably already buying from Computer Associates or from Mercury: bug trakcing, metrics, check-in monitoring, localization development support, and requirements gathering tools. It's an all-in-one package, and it's a very compelling reason to move to a new development dashboard. This is the system used by the Ubuntu people, and one of the things that they seem to like most is the ability to fork whole projects and work on them seperately. This is where the sub-sets of Ubuntu, like Jubuntu, have sprung up.

So now, you have no excuse to pay for a development dashboarding system anymore. Launchpad does everything you need, and it does it well. Canonical has done a terrific job here, polishing the code to a useable shine before releasing it to the public for their own personal use. Kudos to the Canonical team.