Vote:Most Improved Open Source Project

This is the big one. $30k to project that has improved the most. The project that is making Open Source dominate. The nominees are no surprise: GNOME, Mozilla, KDE, LiViD, PHP and Wine. Go Talk about it. Vote. Repeat until satisfied.

Comments

PHP also on multiple platforms

[Anonymous Coward]

PHP works on various Unix flavors with apache and some other web servers, and Windows NT/IIS. So Mozilla's not the ONLY multiple-platform code in the running here. Now, does multiple-platform count when the question is "most improved?" I don't think it necessarily does, though if a project had gone from little platform support to a number of platforms it would be clearly "improved."

(PHP started supporting Windows in version 2, some time back, so it's probably not within the timeframe for consideration here. (This is "most improved" in the last year or so, yes?) Mozilla, of course, always had the goal of multiple platform support.)

That having been said, the decision to drop that much code and start fresh is a bold one, and The Right Thing To Do in a project where quality is more important than time, so I'm not trying to dis Mozilla here. :)

LiVid: pay for legal fees.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to say that LiVid is actually least deserving but most in need of the money. So i voted them. Although i really think Wine gets the real award from me. it's simply awesome.

Vote

[Anonymous Coward]

i vote that you pour a bowl of hot grits down your pants. thank you.

Slash 0.4

[metawronka]

Slash 0.4
by kuro5hin

For a long time now, those who want to use and improve the slashdot code have been wondering, and waiting, and hoping for the much promised 0.4 tarball. Many of them have in fact become quite irate about the lag between code releases, the lack of a CVS server, and the overall appearance that the slashdot gang doesn't practice what it preaches ("release early, release often"). How would you respond to these criticisms, and do you intend to change the development practices in any way in the future?

CmdrTaco:

I get a nice flamey email about once a week from some ass who calls me a hypocrite and slams me for not getting out a new release. My usual response is to tell them that I delay the release by 24 hours each time someone asks me when a new Slash tarball will be out.

Seriously, there are only 3 people who really know how much work a source release for this is: CowboyNeal, Patrick and Me. And the three of us have been working on a lot of stuff. As I write this, we are bugfixing and documenting and preparing for a source release. There is a private CVS server that one day soon will be publicly read only.

This isn't like other projects: it has been custom fit to our hardware and to our needs. It doesn't have install scripts or help or even comments in the code. We're just too busy to play tech support helping dozens of people compile mod_perl and tune Apache. We've decided to squash the bugs and make a clean release rather than rush it.

It's really easy for someone to complain that I didn't release a new version of the source code every week. Its also easy to forget that in the last 6 months we've doubled in traffic and we've had to optimize our code and hardware to handle that. A new source release is secondary: Our job is running Slashdot. We want to release new versions of Slash, but it is a definite second priority to keeping Slashdot moving.

Finally, it's coming soon. It'll be out when its finished. And if you ask me again I'll postpone it again.

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LiViD!

[Crow-]

check out linuxvideo.org.. These are the guys bringinging us DVD and hardware accelerated video playback, they deserve it the most.

Re:Mozilla - here's why!

[Per Abrahamsen]

Mozilla deserves the honor, but what good will US$30.000 do for the project? I think the money can do much more good for some of the other projects.

Mozilla.

[Freshman]

Easy choice.


Outside contributors are now greater than the ones within Netscape. Everyone has a chance to be involved. Even me, and I'm not a C++ coder. I can check in graphics, patches, report bugs, and file testcases to help speed up development.

Mozilla's bug system is fantastic. Mozilla is fantastic.

This is "Most Improved", not "Most Deserving"

[bafful]

This is about selecting the project that has improved the most. Selecting the entity that can make best use of the money and claiming their project has improved most is quite much like conducting a benchmark test after selecting which product will win.

Re:This is "Most Improved", not "Most Deserving"

[MindStalker]

Yes, but in a better world, we would be able to choose how to allot the money, as we can't its a bit of a waist of the money to give it to AOL. So, its a moral debate.

Most improved since when?

[Rommel]

What do we measure against? Most improved in the last six months? last year? ever?

Did ye miss one?

[akawaka]

If we're talking about projects that have helped Open Source become more dominant then surely Linux and other Open Source OS's should get a mention and not the rpojects that depend on them?

GNOME has come so far.

[lostpasswd]

Version 1.0 was totally unstable for me. It was definitely rushed out. October Gnome is rock solid for me, havn't seen it crash in weeks. It is really really slick. Gnome has come from far behind (started a year later than KDE) and is now at least as usable as Windows and KDE. Definitely deserving of this award, and $30,000 will go REALLY far towards helping its continued growth towards the show stopping 2.0. Mozilla is also just as improved as Gnome, but another $30,000 is a drop in the bucket compared to what AOL is shuveling into that project.

OpenBSD deserves this award.

[Brett Glass]

For incorporating OpenSSH (which other projects are now using); for actually auditing the existing code rather than merely adding lots of superfluous new features; for becoming, undisputedly, the world's most secure UNIX-like OS. The project is run on a shoestring and needs the cash, unlike Mozilla (which gets big bucks from AOL) and GNOME (supported by several organizations including the cash-rich FSF). It should be at the top of the ballot.

--Brett Glass

LiViD

[mpav]

Come see us at LinuxWorld Expo in New York! We will be in the .org pavillion. Oh, and if you have a second, vote for LiViD.

KDE vs. GNOME

[Vidboy]

I don't really know which of these has improved more. They both seem nice to me, but gnome can be unstable.

Any suggestions on which is best? Or should I vote for something else?

Is this the FP also?

Mozilla - here's why!

[mozUser123]

I'm voting for Mozilla, here's why:

• At the beginning of 1999 the Mozilla project decided to take a bold move and ditch most of the old Netscape Communicator code and rewrite the rendering engine from scratch making standards compliance number one priority.
• The project suffered some setbacks, including the leaving of a key employee Jamie Zawinski. The press often made the Mozilla project sound like it was going nowhere but despite the negative press AOL/Netscape continues to fund the development and we're nearly approaching beta.
• The project is the only one in the list that works on Multiple platforms. This is an open source product many Windows users will use as well as Linux, Mac, FreeBSD, etc. Writing a cross platform program can be difficul but Mozilla has done well
• Mozilla is often the project that companies look to judge the success of open source. We have to show these companies that Mozilla is a success by raising the profile of the project

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