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OSI Announces Open Source Awards

Posted by michael on from the beanies-slightly-ahead-of-their-time dept.

JohnGrahamCumming writes "There's a story running on ZDNet about how OSI is going to be giving Open Source Awards with cash prizes of up to $10,000. The idea is to create the "Nobel Prizes" of Open Source. Announcement was made yesterday as OSCON with some big names backing the awards (e.g. Sun, OSAF and (interestingly) a major venture capital firm USVP)."

4 of 162 comments (clear)

  1. Venture firm by overshoot · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Makes a lot of sense. Venture firms in general have been hurting lately thanks to the depressing influence of the-monopoly-who-shall-not-be-named. If a little seed money can help break things open, it could pay off handsomely. Of course, having first crack at people with serious ability is probaby worth the ante all by itself.

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    Lacking <sarcasm> tags, /. substitutes moderation as "Troll."
    1. Re:Venture firm by Ciderx · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I think its a tad disingenuous to blame Microsoft for the problems that Venture Capital firms are having. Its more to do with them pouring all their money into ridiculous business ideas like web sites which could never make any money and the sort. The last people that deserve any help from anyone in IT, is Venture Capital firms.

  2. Re:Hooray! by MikeFM · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I wouldn't suggest they award the money to unpopular projects (mine are mostly that way too.. well people use em but seldom contribute) but I would suggest they exclude projects that have funding. I guess I'm suggesting they not give money towards Linux, Apache, PHP, MySQL, Gnome, KDE, Mozilla, OpenOffice, Perl, Python and various other tier one projects. Better to encourage people to write apps that are needed but not as popular. Spread the wealth a little.

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    At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
  3. Re:About time by Homology · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Ah well, the parent must be a troll, but quite a few subscribe to so mercantile and narrow minded views.

    Nobody deserves money for anything they produce unless they can and do sell it for money.

    This view of production is quite naive. Alot of stuff is produced that is not sold, even though the producers get money for their work. An example is mathematicians that produce mathematical knowledge, and are paid for their work by grants and/or saleries. Most mathematics that are produced are certainly not gonna be "sold" in the near future, if ever.

    ... nor will it attract high quality money-motivated programmers, because if you're in it for the money, you're not going to be writing open source projects without a salary anyway.

    Programmers that are just motivated by money are usually not high quality programmers. They tend to leave an unmaintainable buggy mess after themselves.

    There are Open Source projects that have paid programmers. An example is the Norwegian company Systems In Motien (www.sim.no) that have the Open Source 3D API Coin3D (www.coin3d.org)