OStatic

Earlier today, Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth announced the latest addition to the Ubuntu development ecosystem: the Karmic Koala. This release (also referred to by its scientific classification, Ubuntu 9.10) will be unleashed six months after Ubuntu 9.04 (the Jaunty Jackalope) debuts in April.

Shuttleworth hints creatively at some goals for the Karmic release, and manages to make servers, desktops, and netbooks seem as though they're only a link or two away from koalas on the evolutional chain. The server edition will have a special focus on cloud computing, and will include Amazon EC2 tools as well as (you guessed it) Eucalpytus for creating custom, localized cloud configurations. Karmic Koala's server edition will focus on reducing energy consumption.

Desktop Koalas have some internal genetic alterations -- such as flicker free X initialization (in the spirit of Fedora 10) and boot speeds that suggest jungle cat over arboreal marsupial. Shuttleworth also hints at how different this desktop will look. Will the Karmic Koala break from the traditional Ubuntu brown?

How would you like to get involved in engineering the Koala?

Mozilla Labs is out with a new project, dubbed Bespin, aimed at allowing collaborative programming, HTML coding, and development out in the cloud. Mozilla is calling it an open, extensible web-based framework for code editing, and it's released under the Mozilla Public License. Bespin is only an initial prototype at this point, but it's part of a growing effort to deliver open source cloud infrastructure tools. ?Many cloud applications depend on their online hosted status to attract users to collaborate, so why shouldn't development of cloud applications be collaborative and online as well? Open source tools for the cloud may play an important part in obstructing lock-in strategies from cloud service providers.