*This article is [part of a series of articles](https://archivedblog.jonobacon.com/category/why-launchpad-rocks/) about why I feel Launchpad is a great home for your Open Source project. I am writing these articles not as an employee of Canonical, but instead as a happy Launchpad user who gets agitated that not enough people know how cool Launchpad is*.

Open Source is fundamentally driven by *gifts*. People contribute translations, documentation, artwork, code and more. Many of these gifts are made available in the form of *patches*; fragments of content that can be applied to other chunks of content to apply new features, resolve issues or add value in other ways. Patches are wonderful contributions. their authors take the time to care about a problem and invest their expertise and time in producing a solution that everyone can share and benefit from. As such, we should treat these patches with the due care and attention that they deserve.

Something we found in Ubuntu was that we were getting so many patches submitted that many were being lost in the mix and were not getting reviewed and applied if appropriate. This goes against the grain of a *gift* – we should always review these gifts with a strong sense of care and timeliness. The situation was not driven by carelessness or malice, but instead a lack of visibility on these available patches for a given project.

As such, we worked to build a new feature into Launchpad to provide a simple way of looking at all submitted patches. It looks like this:

Accessing this is simple; just add `+patches` to the end of a Launchpad project address. As an example for [Zope](https://edge.launchpad.net/zope/+patches)

https://edge.launchpad.net/zope/+patches

This also applies to source packages in Ubuntu. As an example for the [Gwibber]() source package:

https://edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gwibber/+patches

With each of these patch views you can order the patches by patch age, see the current status of the patch, and see it’s importance. This all provides a better way for these important contributions to be reviewed for the benefit of everyone.

**See a list of all of these Why Launchpad Rocks articles [here](https://archivedblog.jonobacon.com/category/why-launchpad-rocks/)**.