OStatic

The new Open Source for America initiative is starting to get some buzz, with Red Hat, Jaspersoft, Canonical's Mark Shuttleworth, The Linux Foundation's Jim Zemlin, and other companies and individuals announcing their participation. Andy Updegrove, who will serve on the project's Board of Advisors, has a good post up explaining project goals. It's aimed at encouraging the use of open source software at the U.S. Federal level, and already has a lot of support.

When Mike Gunderloy wrote about Canonical's software and development platform, Launchpad, last year, he said even though it wasn't the only hosting service in town, [Its] features... especially the API and sharing bugs, make it a strong choice moving forward. Canonical's announcement today that it has opened Launchpad's source code puts another checkmark in the column of reasons software projects may want to consider using it for their hosting and collaboration needs.

Though Launchpad isn't the only software forge to share the code running its backend, it's certainly among the most well-known. SourceForge, GitHub and other large hosting services haven't made that leap yet, so this move by Canonical is sure to appeal to FOSS purists who want no association whatsoever with proprietary software or code.

As Kristin covered in April, the upcoming OSCON conference will be immediately preceded by an unconference called the Community Leadership Summit, to take place July 18th and 19th in San Jose, California. The event is free for anyone to attend, although if you're planning to attend you should pre-register. There are some scheduled presentations, panel discussions, and social gatherings planned, but much of the event will consist of free-form discussion on what it takes to build a thriving, productive community around an open source project. More details are emerging on the participants, and it looks like a solid event.

While it may be a completely philosophical debate whether the universe is turtles all the way down, it's a lot less existential to imagine that the internet is clouds all the way up. In April, Canonical previewed its Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (affectionately known as UEC), a system designed to simplify the creation, optimization, and management of cloud environments for private organizations. The interface and functionality of UEC is similar to the Amazon EC2 infrastructure, uses in-house hardware running Ubuntu Server Edition 9.04, and is powered by Eucalyptus Systems cloud computing tools.

Today Canonical officially launched the UEC service, including generalized tech support, consultancy and deployment services. Although UEC support is a joint offering from Eucalyptus Systems and Canonical, the Canonical team will act as the primary contact point in order to simplify and streamline support transactions.