Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase Looking for Artistic Ninjas

Ubuntu has once again opened up a call for submissions to anyone interested in being a part of the Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase. If you're a musician, artist, photographer, or all-around creative genius and would like to enter your work in the current competition, you've got until February 9, 2009 to submit something to the judges.

"At the heart of Ubuntu's ethos is a belief in showcasing free software and free culture, and with each development cycle we open the opportunity for any Free Culture artist to put their work in front of millions of Ubuntu users around the world," says the event's wiki page.

In a blog post earlier this year, Ubuntu Community Manager Jono Bacon says the idea came about as a way to put the distro's example-content package to good use. "[The example-content] package provides a bunch of different pieces of content including audio, video, PDFs, OpenOffice.org documents and more. The idea is that you can use this content to kickstart your new Ubuntu system and see what it can do. example-content has been really useful, but it has been languishing a little recently, and then we had a rather interesting idea…Why not use example-content as a great way to show off audio and video from free culture artists?"

All submissions must be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license, and be legally available for distribution in future releases of Ubuntu. Music is preferred for audio submissions, although other entries will be accepted. Video, photo, and graphic submissions are also welcome.

Past winners include a catchy musical piece by Andrés Vidau and a stop-motion animation piece by 14-year old Andrew Higginson.

For full details on the competition, visit the event's wiki page.