For FOSS fans, there's no better place to be this week than Hobart, state capitol of the Australian state Tasmania. That's where Linux.conf.au 2009 is being held through Saturday, January 24.

Developer Stefan Dirsch is responsible for maintaining the openSUSE build scripts of the fglrx driver. In a message on the openSUSE developer mailing list, he appeals for a successor to take over the maintenance.

The Open Solutions Alliance (OSA), a consortium of commercial Open Source providers, sent its members a survey as to the challenges ahead for free software and received some optimistic responses.

Canonical has released its third alpha version of Ubuntu 9.04. It brings a few new features to test, including notification settings in the user interface and the much publicized ext4 filesystem support.

The latest stable release of the GNU Restricted User Shell (Rush), version 1.5, includes new configuration offerings and a notification feature.

Core components of the Sun Java System Web Server 7.0 are now available as open source. Re-named Open Web Server 1.0, Sun Microsystems has released the server under the BSD license.

Canonical, the company behind the Linux distro Ubuntu, will open-source the software development platform Launchpad.

Google will close the microblog project Jaiku and publish the source code under an Apache license.