Canonical CEO and Ubuntu Founder Mark Shuttleworth told recently about his support and board seat for the Linux Foundation. This is a great addition and endorsement of the Linux consortium, formed earlier this year by the fusion of the OSDL and Free Standards Group. It brings Shuttleworth’s proven open source community and business leadership to the group, but it also leaves a few questions.

First off, when the Linux Foundation was formed in January, we thought Canonical, the company behind the leading desktop Linux, was a significant absence from the membership. Although Shuttleworth is joining as a voting board director, he says he serves “not in my capacity as founder of Ubuntu or via Canonical, but as an independent representative of the free software and Linux community.”

Shouldn’t the company behind the leading desktop Linux distro, which is also working with Sun and others to push further into enterprises, be a member of the Linux Foundation?

There is also the matter of Red Hat. While the enterprise Linux vendor can boast a lead in most Linux server markets, the company is not among Platinum Linux Foundation members, like Novell and Oracle, which were both guaranteed board seats. Red Hat is instead a third-level, Silver member of the group, and it has no representation on the new board, which was not officially announced.

Is Red Hat’s lack of prominence in the Linux Foundation an indication of lack of support, either from Red Hat for the group, or from the group for Red Hat?

We also learned this week that Ian Murdock would no longer be serving as CTO for the Linux Foundation. This departure is significant as the founder of Debian Linux and one of the operating system’s most prominent developer-leaders, who will continue chairing the LF’s Linux Standard Base workgroup, now works for Sun, a Gold member of the Linux Foundation.