One of the projects I’be been involved into from the very beginning is Free!Music. It started in early 2002 from two ideas:
- There is something deeply wrong with the way record labels do their business and the way music is promoted.
- Why not have a CD of freely redistributable music as an addition to a Linux distribution?
The first idea came from EXIT project — a music band that doesn’t restrict itself to any particular music genre, playing a fusion of them, often doing jam sessions with musicians who play from jazz to folk to rock music. They were the first to release their tracks under terms of OpenMusic license that was further reevaluated and turned into Free!Music declaration.
The second idea came from ALT Linux — a russian Linux vendor who started as Mandrake and SuSE distributor, then soon quit that business and started it’s own apt-rpm based distribution, doing solutions based on it, being involved into russian e-government project etc.
We had some participants from ex-USSR countries before, but recently the project has become truly international. Yann Bennoist, guitar wizard of famous Space band, who did session work with Mireille Mathieu, Michel Legrand, Patricia Kaas and others has joined us and published four tracks under terms of Free!Music declaration:
Feel free to checkout them, read the interview with Yann and listen to other songs. Oh well, and we have Internet radio playing all published songs 24 hours/day 
Nah, and for those socialized — we have a last.fm group 