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Category: Most Improved Open Source Project
The grand prize Slashdot 2000 Beanie Award is Most Improved Open Source Project. Nominations are open for 2 weeks, and you're welcome to talk about your choices. Good luck.
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First off, I'm biased too, since I'm also a developer for the project.
I just wanted to add that if you look out our initial Slashdot announcement, you will note our progress.
That announcement of the project was made prematurely and without the consent of the rest of the project members (not that I fault Joe Jenkis at all! He was just a bit too enthusiastic!), and we were lambasted by people saying "They don't even have any code!" and "They'll be gone in a few months!". This backlash was warranted by the lack of information on our fledgling website, but look at us now.
Further, we have created a large amount of OpenContent media that is freely modifiable and distributable. I personally think that if our project were to fail tomorrow, that in itself has been enough to justify my 13 months of involvement in the project. I simply cannot praise the artists of WorldForge enough.
If we are talking about Most Improved, I think WorldForge deserves a mention at least.
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I think that the money should go to the wonderful guys working on the Livid project.
Since September/October 1999, thanks to them, I have been able to watch DVDs on my Linux box. I can now watch almost all of the Matrix on my OS of choice and it is thanks to those wonderful people. If they had $30K, just think what they could do!
They would have enough money to buy in to the DVD specs, they may have to relase some partially clsed source code in the form of codecs (like xanim does with its codecs - still keeping everything else free/open/whatever-you-call-it).
It's not an ideal situation to release closed code, but it would allow an absolute top notch job to be done on the Linux DVD front and would give them enough funds to continue to have access to future changes to the DVD specification - changes which may make it much more difficult to view DVDs otherwise (the DVD CCA may use crap copyright protection, but that doesn't mean that the Motion Picture Industry in America won't bring in something much stronger that can't be broken so easily).
How many of you are still keeping a windows box around simply to watch DVDs (I don't BTW)? How many of you would finally be able to say good riddence to Microsoft if Linux DVD were as "good" as it is on certain other platforms?
Before _you_ vote, head on over to http://www.linuxvideo.org and check out the great work being done there.
Remember, open sourced, free software is the future, but we still live in a capitalist world which is driven by money.
This would give some great blokes a fighting chance at top quality support for DVD on Linux, without the user requiring a dual PII 500 to run the software (windows boxes running licensed code from the DVD forum need a much lower spec).
Just something for you to all think about before you vote.
Jonathan.
http://www.jonmasters.org/
The Worldforge project (http://www.worldforge.org) has come a LONG way since its inception over a year ago. And though it's not done, it's definitely on track to create an OpenSource MMRPG system for Linux. Sam Jooky
My choice is biased, of course, since I'm a developer at the WorldForge project, but I must say there has been amazing progress at WorldForge in the last year.
In only about 13 months, we have gone from nothing to 25 megabytes of code in CVS, 23 megabytes of media, an amazing amount of information on the website, many very productive and friendly members, several hundred people on the mailing lists and a very warm-hearted community. I have never seen an online project that smells so much of success as this one does.
For those who don't know about WorldForge, it's an effort to create a Massively Multiplayer Online RPG (similar to titles such as Everquest and Ultima Online) system, that will allow world developers full customisability and clients that can connect to any server through a single protocol (Atlas). We even have support for multiple client types - 3D, 2D isometric, even text - of which we already have several functioning implementations. We have many talented graphics artists (both 2D and 3D) and many, many coders from various locations of the world. All code is covered by the GPL (or LGPL if it proves more appropriate for libraries) and content (graphics, music, text, ...) is covered by the OPL. On September 13 1999 we released our first public client/server demonstration, the Skeleton demo, featuring a server that supports collision detection, visibility and hearing limitations, in-world chat and movement, and an isometric client with very nice graphics :).
Trying to be as objective as possible, I think WorldForge deserves it. Take a look at what's on our website or drop by at irc.worldforge.org and you'll see how far this project has advanced in only one year.