Ground Control

Collaboration on software can be difficult. The bar for entry into that world is set quite high because of the complexity of the tools. Have you ever had a problem with a program and been able to figure out what was wrong—maybe you’ve even been able to write a quick software patch for it—but not been able to figure out how to submit that patch to the original developer? It happens. Think of the case where someone discovers a misspelled word in a bit of Python code and wants to help save a bit of the developer’s time by fixing it.

Ground Control seeks to simplify this and other sorts of collaboration on software projects. It takes the technology and workflows that most developers use and know and makes them available to the Ubuntu desktop where common non-developer end users can use them. It is essentially a version control system built in to the Ubuntu desktop that interacts directly with Launchpad and Bazaar using the standard Ubuntu GNOME file browser. This is also useful when you write the software yourself using Quickly or another method and make it available on Launchpad using a PPA. Then someone comes to you offering a bug fix, someone who may be even less technically proficient with the behind-the-scenes tools.