Slashdot Mirror
Nominations for the 2000 Beanies
We've had a fair amount of nominations for the Slashdot 2000 Beanie Awards, but we'd love to get more, so head over to the nomination booth. For those who missed our initial release, Andover and Slashdot will be giving away $100,000 to deserving Open Source people and projects at LinuxWorld. Nominations end this Friday, with voting starting on Monday. Check out initial story for more details, or the discussion boards for the conversation.
Disclaimer: I'm a biased developer.
I'd seriously consider the WorldForge Project for Most Improved OpenSource Project.
The goal is to creat an open framework for Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games, ala Utlima Online.
As anyone knows, game development under Linux is an area that needs some help. Our project is all about being Open, Linux loving but not Linux specific. We have several other *nix and Win9x developers on the team.
We've been around for about 13-14 months now, and have a demo out, a protocol nearing completion, a huge archive of OpenContent (like the GPL, but for content) media, and several associated client and server projects.
For more info, check out the Most Improved OpenSource Project discussion, as well as the WorldForge website.
This space intentionally left blank.
ALSA - Most Improved Project
ALSA - Most Improved kernel module (:))
Rob Levin - Unsung Hero
#debian team on OPN - Best Newbie Helpers
SPI - Most deserving opensource charity
bb using aalib - Best Unix Eyecandy
alsaplayer - Best Unix Earcandy
perl/tk - Best Perl Module
php - Best Apache Module
vi - Best Text Editor
Broadcast 2000 - Deserving a $2000 award
sawmill - Best Graphical Interface
epic4-axur - Best Text Interface
AC - Best Dressed
Amazon - Big Dumb Patent Bully
eToys.com - Big Dumb Domain Bully
Hemos the Hamster - The Hemos Award.
The stuff I left out was not applicable in my view.
--
This might be cynical of me but what happened to that installer?
:-))
/rant >
It has been orphaned, like half the debian packages. (I can be just a cynical.
< rant >
Sorry, I'm a little down on debian right now since scsidev seg faults with any 2.2.x kernel (yes, even the one from potato), thus making cdrecord and numerious gui front-ends for cd burning useless (xcdroast does work, however). Slink has been showing its age for quite some time, to the point where it is getting painful. Although we've been using debian for quite a while where I work, the long turnaround between releases and updates has forced us to take a hard look at other Distributions such as Suse, RedHat, and Mandrake, even though all of us are (or in several cases were) debian fans. (No, running unstable releases aren't an option. Unstable means just that, sometimes with severe consiquences.)
I do not think Debian at all qualifies as "most improved product" since it has been a year and there is no new stable release yet, although if potato comes out before the awards are final perhaps this would change. I would vote for SPI for the "deserves to win $2000" award without hesitation, however, as they are the only fully open reference Linux distribution (that I am aware of) and do deserve our support (all frustrations on my part aside).
<
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
You are free to nominate it yourself (and you should). Documentation writers are all too often overlooked. Although my vote is for Linux DVD, I think your proposal is also very worthy (I've already made my nomination, obviously).
... but I digress. :-)
I like your comment about the LinuxOne IPO. How to lose money on an IPO, tarnish the Linux community's reputation, and behave like an ass before the world all at once! I'd love to turn a couple of dominatrix friends of mine loose on the CEO of LinuxOne for a few days, armed with rusty razer blades
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I wish somebody would nominate http://www.LinuxNinja.com/linux-admin/ for the ``LAME'' guide I put 2 years of part-time work into it for the good of the community. (hint hint wink wink)
(Actually I'm just trying to get noticed by the various Linux companies, because Doc writers never seem to get ``The Letter''. ;-( ) How can I ever earn my million unless I can get in on the upcoming LinuxOne IPO? (heh)
The howto was a Joke.
So what if we hate M$? Go to any Mac site and you will hear simular stuff (they will focus more on the UI and "we did it first" then stability).
Most slashdot readers have decided that open standards/source are good things and are aginst any company who wants to do things in a closed way. Besides M$ is not the only company we hate, listed with M$ are AOL, Linux One (yes, a linux company), Sun (kinda, sorta, maby not). Basically anybody who pushes closed standards on people or rips people off. And no, Open Source is not about beating M$, it is about...making things open (humm...that would explain the name)!
Slashdot's karma thing is not supposed to insure that {everybody|idea|product} gets equil air time but instead supposed to elivate the comments the slashdot community finds interesting.
I assure you that if 200,000 windoze users were to suddenly decide that slashdot were the place to be that the comments would quickly turn pro M$ and anti anything else. Because the windoze users would be the new community and that would be what they want to hear. Yes there are abusers of the moderation system, but there are abusers at your Bank/Credit union too (no system is abuse proof).
Oh, and the GNOME/KDE wars are FUN! , while at the same time showing how both systems excell and what both systems lack. Besides we have not had a big GNOME/KDE war in some time.
END
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
At what point does it become "My app is better than your app" or have we already gottent that far?
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Seriously, what do you think that $30k prize is going to go towards? I guess it depends on who it's given to, but it seems to me that there's only a few projects around that would be able to adequately deal with a $30k donation.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
First let me say that I'm not a programmer (I'm a mouth) and that the following could easily be interpreted as totally self-interested, and to top it off they aren't even Linux-specific. Moderate me down, see if I care. :)
/. assistance appreciated). Obligatory Commercial: Anybody on Slashdot who wants to try e-gold today can e-mail me with an account number.
The guys at http://www.cryptix.org/ are my favorites. Cryptix(tm) is an international volunteer effort to produce robust, open-source cryptographic software libraries. Cryptix products are free, both for commercial and non-commercial use and are being used by developers all over the world. Development is currently focused on Java. Without them, the cool stuff that's happening at: http://www.webfunds.org/ Webfunds (some of it indirectly involving my company) would not be possible.
Along some of the same lines, what's going on at: http://www.erights.org/ E involving a secure distributed object platform and scripting language for writing Capability-Based Smart Contracts is also exceptionally cool, and somewhat related is Tyler's http://www.waterken.com/ Waterken (which isn't a charity, but which is very cool IMO). Disclaimer: I like all the principals of these 4 groups as friends, and all 4 groups tend to "get" what I sell, which is e-gold, which currently uses too much closed-source stuff (that may change in the future,
Something to keep in mind is the old adage "follow the money." It's as true in trying to supplant M$ as it is in politics, IMO. Good luck, choose well, and above all have fun.
JMR
[Speaking only for myself, YMMV, etc. etc.]
Try e-gold - (contact me). I'm NOT e-
It's great to see Slashdot putting money into the hands of deserving open source projects. However, I have tried visiting the voting booth, and things are considerably more confusing than they should be. There are several pages worth of space devoted to pointless or non-existent awards. What would be much more rewarding is a simple category title of 'Best Project' in several key categories.
Eg. 'Best Project in... window managers', 'Best Project in... kernel development', 'Best Project in... spreadsheet software', 'Best Project in... games', etc, etc.
insignificant sig
Yes, geeks have feelings. Some of us are thicker-skinned than others. But personally, I think that as the open source community grows larger there is a place for mechanisms for drawing attention to the best that we have. There is no central guiding authority in open source. Our leaders and spokespeople have those roles by consensus.
Slashdot has already fulfilled the purpose of bringing our attention to various projects and people. And by allowing and encouraging us to post our thoughts, and through community moderation, it has facilitated people talking to each other. We have grown too big not to fragment without such a service. Yes, open source geeks will continue to do our own thing, vigorously. What this communication eliminates is the scattering into separate camps that don't talk for lack of a place to do it.
True, The Beanies are a popularity contest. True, many worthy people won't win, and many won't even be nominated. I took the trouble to nominate some people who I don't believe have much chance of winning, but are worthy of being noticed on the list of nominees. (Guys, there will be a complete list of nominees, won't there?) The money can do one very wonderful thing for an open source project. It could pay for a labor of love to live on a couple more years. It could pay to replace aging hardware or for a faster connection for somebody who could do more if he had more.
I wouldn't turn down the money, but I'm not likely to win in any category. I'd be honored to share the company of those nominated. Isaac Newton stated that he had seen farther because he stood on the shoulders of giants. In the case of open source, the giants designed a city full of wonders and we who have contributed have come to hoist the girders, and paint the walls. If a man truly can be known by the company he keeps, then I cannot fully state the pride I feel to be a part of this community.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
I think the "community" is about Freedom. Now, you might not define Freedom in the way RMS does, but I do believe that he was on to something.
Where there is Freedom, there is no contradiction between competition and sharing. You get to decide you who you share with and you get to decide who you compete against. Only in Ideal Communist Dictatorships do you have sharing without competition.
Perhaps you are referring to a BSD "community" here. Where everything is given away and there's no competition. Oh wait, that doesn't fit either, witness FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD and BSDI. Each of these compete, in their own ways, against the others to make the "best" system.
From the very beginning of the Free Software Foundation, I think RMS made it quite clear that his movement was in competition with evil software "hoarders". Under the GPL, there is free sharing only with those who are like minded.
I recall reading, years ago, when Tux was just being drawn that Linus wanted to see a graphic with Tux and the BSD Daemon playing Ice Hockey against each other. Linus clearly saw it as a competition and this has spurred him on to "make a better system". Linus was the one who said that the goal was "World Domination", after all.
I don't know what "community" that you've been in contact with , but those who really founded THIS "community" (RMS, Linus, the various *BSD leaders) were never part of it.
-Jordan Henderson
Quake. No doubt about it. One of the best interfaces for any game I've ever seen.
I'm actually going to agree with you on this one: Somewhere along the line this "community" became more about competition than it did about sharing. And isn't that what it's
supposed to be? Sharing code and working together together to make a better system?
I think that so called "communities" are always about sharing but that eventually we swing back the other way. Take a look a history and see for your self. The decade of the 1960's can be interpreted as being a very sharing time in terms of you thought. The 70's was a time where people became less interested in various things due to apathy and having their own ecconomic problems and then we see the 1980's where people abandoned the concept of sharing and went full bull into the capitalistic concept. This is what eventually evolves when we have an open community.
Slashdot exemplifies this competitive spirit. People post just to get more Karma (there's even a HowTo out there) and almost every thread turns into a pissing contest. It's silly,
and the Anti-Microsoft attitude just makes it worse. People here hate Microsoft and literally act like this whole Open Source Movement is just about beating MS. And if they're
not talking about beating NT in server sales, they're starting a flame-war about KDE/Gnome. It blows my mind that there could ever be competition in an open source
community... I think some people are just plain missing the point.
Hmm.. well I think that there are some interesting points. But what we see is what most irritates people. Fundamentally people hate microsoft? Why well because for a large number of vocal people they have been shafted by MS and really think of them of as the devil. Now I ask you is this totally without merit? I even had a professor just I think 2 days ago in a university setting make the statement that no one can really get away with releasing broken low quality software except MS. I am sure that some if not most of the people who complain about MS have had to use or learn something about it against their will. You know what? I have been basically forced to use NT in various lab machines and 95 on others. The only place I actually get to use linux have been 2 places (well soon 3). One was in a HS environment a couple of years ago and the other is at home. I have never actually been able to use a really nice linux setup very easily. This dosn't make me bitter just appreciative about what I actually have.
Now you talk about the pissing contest. I cannot stress enough about the fact that many people do consider this a pissing contest. Signal 11 is one of these folks. He wanted the glory and I am not saying that I don't want glory in some form but I have even espoused various points of view that are in sharp contrast to what people want. Does listing your slashdot karma on your resume actually help you? No does it give you a warm fuzzy? yes. Actually I think there is competition for a vision in terms of what people have been exposed to. Suppose that we officially said that the dominate editor for linux distros. would be Xemacs? Now what do you think the reaction would be from most folks around here? Probablly what would happen would be anarchy in some way. There are some people who linux vi/vim/ed/ or cat >prog.c and then terminate with a ^D (I actually did this in desperation once).
Maybe some people are actually missing the point in terms of what they should do. To be fair I have not the current skills to actually write a "good" piece of GPL software unless you want a bunch of crappy specialized obfuciated C++ programs or perhaps Pascal stuff (basically not written anymore).
This whole place is getting out of hand...
Maybe so if someone actually wrote a Howto. Tell me where is this little thing I really am flabergasted that someone actually wrote one.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
Oooh, that is a good question. I don't actually know any of the projects budget. I would assume that it would be one of the larger projects that would have a chance of using it.
Apache, FreeBSD, XFree86... but that is a shot in the dark.
The projects that you name are all basically evoloved projects that are not really in need of our help. What I would love to look is taking this money and giving it to people who are real under dogs and having them develop their app from some little thing that maybe was on freshmeat or their own personal site to something that would be in the next Red Hat or Debian. That would be totally amazing. I would vote for something that departs from the standard fare of network apps or graphical stuff. Maybe something like a new compiler or perhaps something like a good IDE or even a class of so called "boring" apps that would help business professionals.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
This project does, and continues to be everything we need. With out these programmers *nix would be sitting in the dust of Microsoft. Version 4.0 is the most anticipated version
yet; I know I'm salavating over the next release!
Everything? Seriously just having an X server is far from having everything. Unless the apps work on that server then it's pretty much useless. Are they actively attempting to optimize? Are they trying to get better working code for even low end cards? Personally I don't need a server for a Voodoo 3 6000 and I doubt most reasonable people do as well. Now argue with me all you want about supporting all the really "cool" hardware that "everybody" has but I just think that priorities should go to something a little more deserving.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
We all know these kind and very generous folks as the people who brought us the wonderful Debian GNU/Linux distribution. They have done quite well at creating a good distribution and are basically the only distribution that allows for 100% free distributions of Linux and they are also working on the GNU/Hurd as well. Because of all their functionality and ability I think we should nominate them.
Don't believe me? Well consider this. I got an old CD set with linux that had a bunch of old distributions on it one of them was an early beta copy of Debian (0.98 or 0.99 or something like that). Guess what? The install was pretty cool and very nice and the entire thing was probably more functional than half of the distributions that were around at the time and consequently more useful as well. We can't say that about many.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
Yes, it's official: geeks have feelings. Why, oh why, did you do this Rob? Must we "award" our community members for good work? Isn't it obvious that this will serve as a demotivational tool for those who don't win the awards (and those who do will be accused of kissing up and whatnot)? Am I taking this alittle too seriously? Maybe. I'm sure people who respond to this post will think so. "It's all fun and games!" Yeah, but feelings still get hurt.
Can't we just rely on the traditional methods - "scratching the itch" and letting the work be it's own reward? Why must we move closer to traditional social rewards / punishments to enforce our community ideals? It worked fine before...
1) Favorite way to kill JonKatz in effigy.
2) Best way Microsoft has screwed you over today.
3) Best decoration idea for AOL (or is that Time Warner?) free trial disks.
4) Most frequent Slashdot visitor (in geek terms...biggest geek).
5) Author of code most resembling a Rube Goldberg machine.
6) Most confusing instruction manual (you know, those paperweights that come with software and stuff).
7) Dumbest customer support call.
8) Dumbest customer support representative.
9) Internet Invention Award (only Al Gore may be nominated).
10) If it takes half a man half a day to dig half a hole, how long will it take three monkeys to climb the Empire State Building--A, B, or C, true or false?
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extremely vitriolic, invective hurling, Microsoft® bashing diatribe? And I work so hard at it too...
Boojum
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
It would be nice if there were some community support for the Freetype project . Fonts, are a vital part of the user interface and freetype has been active in developing a reverse-engineered TrueType font engine. They have discovered that Apple has patents on their TT fonts and are currently in negotiation with them....please, let's support them!
1. You don't have to nominate just Linux projects. Even the "Kernel Module" category could mean a BSD module. None of the categories explicately say "Linux" so if you feel your favorite project is being overlooked then post an argument for it in the nomination forums so others will be persuaded to vote with you.
2. Please read the category list before suggesting that mod_perl be named "Most Deserving of $2000" because you will notice there is a category called "Best Apache Module". I see some nomination ideas being posted in entirely the wrong category.
3. Don't be afraid to nominate a charity or anyone outside of the computer realm for "Most Deserving of $2000". It's wide open to suggestions. Post your suggestions in the approprate forum where others can follow your lead. Be creative.
The entire project has gone from being a pipe dream to allowing one to play movies under Linux, whether or not they've been encrypted with css, in an amazingly short time, both in software and with some hardware (e.g. DXR2, Matrox G400).
Furthermore, DVD playback is a feature that is very important if Linux is to ever be a serious desktop contender against Windows (which I believe it to be -- we use it on our desktops at work and at home). The project still has allot of work ahead of it to allow my grandmother to play DVDs under Linux without being a UNIX guru, but its strides to date have been very remarkable.
Finally, the project is under ongoing attack by legal thugs at the behest of the DVD Forum in much the same way DeCSS is (the author of css-auth, the utility which allows Livid's Linux DVD utilities to play back encrypted movies, was forced to hand off the project to someone else after being threatened with legal action in the UK). In a "bang for buck" analysis I like the return to the Open Source community, especially the Linux and FreeBSD communities, from a donation to this project deserves consideration:
Help with legal defense of developers when required
Hardware for developers to work on (new DVD players, decoder cards, etc.)
While not the only deserving project by any means, DVD playback is an important one, and IMHO worthy of consideration.
NOTE: I am not affiliated with Livid in any way, except as an enthusiastic user who enjoys watching DVD's on his Linux box. I guess that would make me a "consumer"/"beta-tester" for the project, at most.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
We all know it, XFree86
XFree86 is a freely redistributable implementation of the X Window System that runs on UNIX(R) and UNIX-like operating systems (and OS/2). The XFree86 Project has traditionally focused on Intel x86-based platforms (which is where the `86' in our name comes from), but our current release also supports other platforms. One of our current goals is to increase the range of platforms that XFree86 runs on.
This project does, and continues to be everything we need. With out these programmers *nix would be sitting in the dust of Microsoft. Version 4.0 is the most anticipated version yet; I know I'm salavating over the next release!
Justen Stepka