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Launchpad: The Road Ahead

·2 mins

I know that many of you follow the Launchpad Road Map with an interest so keen and passionate that it can only be described as obsessive. Some of you might fail to penetrate through its crusty, bureaucratic exterior to its swirling, luminous core, and thus stumble blindly into the future, heedless of the glancing rays that this document triumphantly casts on the road ahead. If you are one of these benighted souls, then take my arm and allow me to guide you on.

We’re starting to get a picture of what we want to do in the second half of 2010. In particular, lots of people within the team and within Canonical are starting to get fed up with our privacy and permissions model, which is quite patchy. It’s currently tangled up with the way we send emails to people, and we’d love to untangle them.

The Foundations team are already at work making Launchpad faster, and that’s something we want work on even more in the coming months. Derivative distributions – that is, a Linux distribution that extends or customizes another one, generally Ubuntu – have always been a key part of the vision for Launchpad, and they are finally going to get the effort they deserve.

Finally, we want to do whatever we can to make the Ubuntu Software Center rock harder than it does already. Launchpad occupies a special place in the Software Center world, since it can help make it easier to get applications for your desktop and make it easier to develop those applications.

Glorious and radiant though it is, the light of the road map shines onto the ever-changing territory of the future. We might discover new twists, valleys might open up before us, vast emergences could … emerge. We’ll keep the map current, but it will change. If you wish to stay as up-to-date as possible, subscribe now.

Strategist out.