During a keynote last night at the OSCON open source convention in Portland, Ubuntu founder and Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth affirmed that the Launchpad project hosting platform developed by his company will likely be released under an open source license within the next year.

Although the timeline is still tentative, he articulated a clear commitment to follow through with the plan. "We will release the source code within the next twelve months," he said during his presentation.

The proprietary status of Launchpad has long been a point of contention in the open source community. Some critics have characterized the closed source development of the platform as hypocritical, and a deviation from the company's stated values. Shuttleworth said last year that opening Launchpad is part of the company's long-term strategy, but that it couldn't be done until there was a clear revenue model for paying its developers. The lack of a clear timeline has contributed to skepticism and doubt.

Several pieces, including the Storm object-relational mapping framework, have already been opened, but little has been said over the past year about the plan for opening the rest. That changed last night when Shuttleworth disclosed his plans for getting the source code out to the community within a year.

The public availability of the Launchpad source code will help to accelerate development and adoption of the service and will likely eliminate the trepidation that has discouraged some members of the open source community from using it for their own projects in the past. As I noted in my recent coverage of the Launchpad user interface overhaul, it's already a much better service than competing closed-source project hosting services like Sourceforge and Google Code. An open code base will make Launchpad even more appealing and make it possible for the broader community to help take it to the next level.