Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Two years ago, Mark Shuttleworth, the head of Canonical, told iTWire that the company was on track to free up the source code for Launchpad, a system that serves as a single repository for revision control.
At that time the company had just released the source for Storm, one component of Launchpad.
Yesterday, he delivered on that promise. In a media release, Canonical said that users could now participate directly in the development of Launchpad.
While Launchpad was always a handy central repository, the obvious danger was that the data was all under the control of one company - Canonical.
Given the closed source nature of the application, people were reluctant to commit to using it.
Such fears have now been removed. Shuttleworth said in the media release: "Launchpad accelerates collaboration between open source projects. Collaboration is the engine of innovation in free software development, and Launchpad supports one of the key strengths of free software compared with the traditional proprietary development process.
"Projects that are hosted on Launchpad are immediately connected to every other project hosted there in a way that makes it easy to collaborate on code, translations, bug fixes and feature design across project boundaries.
"Rather than hosting individual projects, we host a massive and connected community that collaborates together across many projects. Making Launchpad itself open source gives users the ability to improve the service they use every day.”
Ever the businessman, Shuttleworth has also offered to let closed source projects use Launchpad - for a fee.
The release said this meant projects could utilise the features that Launchpad provided but did not need to share code if that was not desirable. Privacy features are in beta right now, and would be added as they became available.
David Bass
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