Over the past four years, the word Linux has become almost synonymous with Ubuntu; the company behind Ubuntu, Canonical, has proportionately gained an enormous amount of mindshare within the FOSS community.

Open source licenses help to define the terms and conditions of software use and redistribution. But what are the terms and condition under which developers actually contribute code? That's the realm of software contribution agreements.

FOSSDev is an year long (Jan '08 to FOSSMeet@NITC '09) contest which aims at promoting contributions to FOSS projects. Total prize money amounts to Rs. 23,500 (will increase, subjected to sponsorships). If you have any queries regarding FOSSDev, make a post in the forum.

It is announced as part of FOSS Meet@ NITC 2008 and its focus of bringing more student contributors to foss. Programs like Google Summer of code is helping more student contributions to foss from India. 60 students got selected in this years program. List of students selected for Google Summer of Code from India

Canonical is visibly struggling with balancing its commercial efforts with being a corporate citizen of free and open source software (FOSS).

Canonical on Thursday made available the Release Candidate of its latest Linux-based operating system, Ubuntu 9.10, on the same day Microsoft launched the long-awaited Windows 7.

In his note, Stallman made clear the difference between Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and open source as conceived by Eric Raymond and supporters in the business community. FOSS is not just "free as in free beer". Under FOSS software is free, not just for the user. The software itself has liberties.

After having a meeting with a medium sized business owner about his need for a website it became painfully clear to me that "we" as the FOSS "community" need to do a much better job at making what it is we are offering more visible. We need something that communicates what FOSS is and what benefits there are for using FOSS applications.

Red Hat is the king of commercial Linux support, no doubt about it. Canonical has entered the market and with some refined support products could present a very compelling alternative.

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical and Ubuntu, sat for a video interview with Dell Cloud Computing Evangelist Barton George. In it, Shuttleworth takes a "service pack" shot at Windows 7 and covers numerous questions about Canonical's business and cloud strategy. Here's the video - plus some perspectives from WorksWithU.