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.

Free office solution OpenOffice.org is still in the best of shape, based on reactions from project members to Novell developer Michael Meeks's recent pessimistic view. The Linux Foundation is one of many who are concerned. All want one thing: more.

Fedora is to change the address of its mailing lists from fedora-*redhat.com to lists-*fedoraproject.org.