Canonical, the Ubuntu creator looking to make a deflationary buck and apparently thinking of Microsoft's Live Mesh, is going into the cloud storage business using Amazon's S3.

It's got some internally developed, Dropbox-reminiscent proprietary code called Ubuntu One that it just released to its community as an invitation-only beta.

Naturally the proprietary side of this whole adventure has raised some hackles but the client software is licensed under GPLv3 and Creative Commons. It's the server side that's a problem.

The widgetry is meant to auto-sync files and databases and share them with other people or machines.

Canonical reportedly fancies it will become a full-blown online platform.

At this point it's bound for release with Ubuntu 9.10, aka Karmic Koala, in October - though it currently requires 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope - and will apparently work someday on other Linux distributions although now it's tightly integrated into the Ubuntu desktop environment and can currently just sync files.

Any changes will be automatically uploaded to the web service complements of the GNOME Nautilus file manager and then propagated by power of an applet on each computer.

Dropbox of course is cross-platform and works with Windows and ISX as well as Linux. Live Mesh leaves out Linux but embraces phones.

Canonical's pricing is apparently still in flux and may get cheaper to compete but so far an Ubuntu One user will get 2GB of storage for free and 10GB increments for $10 a month. Dropbox charges $10 for 50GB; Live Mesh comes with a 5GB free.