In the afternoon at the Executive Briefing Tim O’Reilly spoke with Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu/Canonical, in the “Why Free Software Values Work for Business” session. Like many conversations, this conversation veered off the main topic pretty quickly and started focusing on collaboration in the open source space.

Mark observed that open source’s key strength against legacy companies is the ability to collaborate. Many people from all over the globe, many of whom have never met, work together to create complex software releases like Ubuntu. These people work to release software at regular intervals and with much greater frequency than either Microsoft or Apple. The ability to collaborate in a distributed fashion and produce quality results gives open source a significant advantage in the market.

The decentralization of the open source community gives it a lot of strength and resilience, but at the same time it presents a number of communication challenges. Many open source projects have their own infrastructure like bug trackers, wikis and version control and these tools do not communicate with each other. A group like Ubuntu needs to talk to all of these projects and with so many disparate infrastructures, this becomes quite a challenge.

Ubuntu/Canonical’s Launchpad aims to solve these collaboration problems in the open source space. Launchpad allows many open source projects to collaborate by interacting with the existing infrastructure components. Launchpad allows cross project bug tracking, one common place for accessing source repositories and a number of other features that improve collaboration in the open source space.

Launchpad was born out of necessity to communicate with upstream projects. Many times bugs get reported in one software project, but fixing the bug may require action from a completely different project. In order to tackle complex bugs like this and to improve its communication with upstream projects that make up the Ubuntu distribution, Canonical created Launchpad.

Mark hopes that with tools like Launchpad the open source community will set the standard for best practices and create coherent processes for a service oriented world. Mark also mentioned that legacy companies like Microsoft already take heed from the open source world and have adopted some of these practices in their own business. For instance, Microsoft integrated the concept of creating communities around various parts of the Vista operating system.

Personally, I would have to agree with Mark. The open source development process is amazingly robust and effective, even if the duplication of effort that is inherent in the process would scare most traditional managers. The decentralization of this process makes it far more robust than most closed source efforts and the downsides to radical decentralization do not prevent quality products from being shipped. I’m glad to see that Mark supports projects like Launchpad that actively work to reduce the downsides of radically decentralized teams.