Canonical Tuesday open-sourced the code under Launchpad, the software development platform used to build Ubuntu and “thousands of other projects.” It said users can now participate directly in Launchpad’s development.

Launchpad lets developers host and share code from different sources using the Bazaar version control system integrated into Launchpad.

Canonical says translators can collaborate on translations across different projects. End users can identify bugs. Contributors can write, propose and manage software specifications. Launchpad’s supposed “to erase barriers to collaboration by enabling people to support each other’s efforts across different project hosting services, both through its web interface and its APIs.”

Canonical points out that the project don’t necessarily have to be open source. Launchpad hosts open source projects for free, but closed source projects pay a fee.

Projects don’t have to share code. Its privacy features are currently in beta, and will be added to the commercial service as they become available.

The code was released under the Affero GPL.

However, Launchpad’s forte, Canonical says, is collaboration “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.”

Canonical will continue to run the Launchpad servers, and take care of production and deployment issues.

See www.launchpad.net.