Ubuntu is an open-source operating system which aims for ease of use. The BBC's George Wright and Ubuntu Community Manager Jono Bacon offered to install the OS on a laptop for Ashley to take home and experiment with.

Jono Bacon, Ubuntu's community manager, has been hard at work nailing gelatin to the wall. Okay, not literally, but he's putting a lot of thought into how he can best determine the vitality, growth, needs and wants of the Ubuntu community and how they best mesh with, and give back to, the wider Linux and open source communities.

Ubuntu has rapidly established itself as the leading GNU/Linux distribution on the desktop, not least through its work with Dell. Less well-known is the fact that Canonical, the company sponsoring Ubuntu – and trying to create a viable business around it – is based in London. One of the key members of staff working there is Jono Bacon, Canonical's Ubuntu Community Manager.

Software that listens to and analyzes music is driving a Sun open source project, which aims to build a music recommendation system that surpasses the systems used today by iTunes and Amazon.

The band has teamed up with Google to release the data for the promo as open source using a Creative Commons license. Take a gander at how it looks here--better than a lot of music videos in my opinion.

I’m, first of all, a passionate for music. My passion for music before I can recall it, and grew with the fact that I had the luck to have older brother and sisters whose music collection was wide enough to feed my music interests. Also since a little kid I was interested in technology, and started programming at the age of four. Being nowadays a music lover and also a musician, and at the same time graduated and working as a Computer Science Engineer, I feel myself lucky to have some ground bases to analyse the state of music business.

The Dejunair Project creates "Free and Open Source Music" or "Open Music". This means simply, you can use the music for whatever you want at no cost (free beer!). You can use the tracks for podsafe music in your podcast, backing or overlay music in videos, remix for a total new track, or whatever else you can dream up.

Severed Fifth, a metal solo project born in the heart of FLOSS community was launched today under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license. "[...]This will allow anyone to download, listen to, share and re-mix the songs freely, with the only condition that suitable attribution and credit is placed."

Good luck Jono!

DRM-free music sells at a much higher rate online than protected music, according to UK-based digital music store 7 Digital. In fact, customers buy it four times as often as they do DRMed music. As a result, almost 80 percent of the store's sales are of DRM-free content.