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OSI Announces Open Source Awards
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)."
*ducks*
Pick me! Pick me! Oh, wait a second... my project isn't popular and no one contributes to it.
The Razzies for this will be called "The Pre-Alpha-Aplha Awards", given out to OSS projects that never make it out of "-1, thinking about it"
I thought we decided that Sun was evil this week. Did I miss a memo?
What don't they give awards for nowadays?
This post, Winner, 2003
Best Slashdot Post
Best Use of Consonants in Slashdot Post
Louis K. Albright Award for Achievement in Punctuation
.
Your paranoia is about as subtle as the alien probe in your neck.
Well, most people in the world live on $2 per day. So thats 5 000 days or enought to survive more than 13 years.
For many people on the earth that's a large sum.
Just saying it like it are.
This could entice Microsoft employees to leak windows code! At least in my world it could. You can't have mine! Get your own unicorns! Ack! Spiders!
But really, if one was to write such a super OSS program, wouldn't he be hired by a big corporation and paid at least ten times that amount?
Transmeta isn't exactly a big corporation, and considering that the Sr. VP of Worldwide Sales only makes $262K a year I'm not even sure Linus is making $100K. And that's the big guy, the supreme God of open source software. I'm sure there are lesser mortals in the OSS world making less than $100K.
Open source software is generally written by much more than one person. Would the winner have to split her winnings with hundreds of others, or would the award go to whoever led the project?
I mean the 7 layer stack is nice and all, but don't they know that TCP/IP is the standard these days?
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.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
The Open Source Awards categories include:
The Grand Master Award: This award will be given to persons with an outstanding record of contributions to the open-source and Internet cultures. Ideal candidates will have a record not only of technical excellence but of community leadership and service. Along with the recognition as Grand Master, the recipient will receive $10,000 and an invitation to serve as an elector on the collegium that issues the awards.
Merit Awards: These awards will be given four times per year for work on specific open-source or network-service projects. Recipients will be recognized at the annual event and will receive a cash award of $500.
The Special Award - These awards may occasionally be conferred at the Awards Committee's discretion as a way of recognizing praiseworthy projects or conduct not covered by the existing regular categories and experimenting with new categories. Recipients will be recognized at the annual event and will receive a cash award of $1500.
Jeremy Allison, one of the lead developers on the Samba Team, a group of programmers developing an open source Windows(tm) compatible file and print server product for UNIX systems. Allison handles the release engineering and the co-ordination of Samba development efforts worldwide and acts as a corporate liaison to companies using the Samba code commercially.
Larry Augustin, a venture partner at Azure Capital Partners where he specializes in software, systems, and related IT infrastructure technologies. He currently serves on the boards of directors of VA Software Corporation (as chairman), the Open Source Development Lab, Linux International, and the Free Standards Group. Previously he was conference chairman for LinuxWorld Conference and Expo, and served on the conference advisory board. Augustin has appeared as a regular columnist in Linux Magazine, has written numerous articles, and is the author of "Hardware Design and Simulation in VAL/VHDL," published by Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Jim Gettys, a member of HP Labs' Cambridge Research Lab, currently working on making open source systems safe on handheld computers. He helped found the handhelds.org community. In 1984, Gettys started the X Window System that forms the base technology of the Linux and UNIX desktops, on which Gnome and KDE are based. Gettys worked at W3C on loan from Compaq Computer Corporation's Industry Standards and Consortia group from 1995-1999. He is the editor of the HTTP/1.1 specification (now an IETF Draft Standard).
Dr. Marshall Kirk McKusick, author, consultant, and professor on UNIX- and BSD-related subjects. While at the University of California at Berkeley, he implemented the 4.2BSD fast file system and was the research computer scientist at the Berkeley Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG), overseeing the development and release of 4.3BSD and 4.4BSD. He has been a strong advocate for the open-source movement since its inception in the mid 1980s.
Keith Packard, developer of open source software since 1986. Packard has focused on the X Window System since 1987, designing and executing large parts of the current implementation. He is currently employed by HP as a member of the Cambridge Research Laboratory working on pervasive and mobile computing. In 1999, he received a Usenix Lifetime Achievement award for his work on the X Window System.
Eric S. Raymond, observer-participant anthropologist in the Internet hacker culture. His research has helped explain the decentralized open-source model of software development that has proven so effective in the evolution of the Internet. His own software projects include one of the Internet's most widely-used email transport programs. Raymond is the co-founder of the Open Source Awards.
Guido van Rossum, creator of Python, one of the major free scripting languages. He created Python in the early 1990s at the National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science in the Netherlands, and is still actively involved in the development of the language. van Rossum recently accepted a position at Elemental Security, a start-up founded by Dan Farmer.
The nominees in the category of Longest Lived Project to Never Release 1.0 are -
And the winner is ... the HURD! (Cue music as
RMS goes up to the stage).
</flamebait>
"And this is my boy, Sherman. Speak, Sherman." "Hello." "Good boy."
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.
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)
I bet these people would be happy to contribute toe.
I still think your confused - you've made a lot of leaps of logic that don't quite work out, I think.
You say that OSS guys get into it, then companies go bankrupt when some vendors pick up the OSS version. That's not the case though - when there's a proprietary and OSS version of something, then there's options and competition - one doesn't preclude the other. IE, Apache is recognized and kicks much ass, but you don't see websphere or IIS etc going away.
You also say people work on it for free, only the core devs get paid, and the others just contribute for recognition and get nothing. Not so though, there's a very high likelihood that if the product becomes popular and used by businesses, then anyone with good familiarity with it have an excellent chance at employment working on it, adding those little features businesses need but the core project doesn't, as well as the support details.
Last I checked, putting OSS in a hardware brochure doesn't equate to more sales - rather, the quality, performance, functions of the hardware are what generate sales, not because of a bullet point that mentions OSS in the product documentation. Infact these days, that bullet point will get you sued by some asshole company claiming IP issues most likely.
As many studies have shown, while OSS has a different pricing structure, it still costs quite a bit to support/use it. Instead of blowing all that cash on prepackaged proprietary software and licenses, most of the same money gets spent on dev/admin/support of the competing OSS option. That means that instead of MS getting another 100k in their bank account, a couple of dev/admin/support people get a Job!
Companies that need specific solutions require development staff, whether it's working on a proprietary product or working to extend/specialize an OSS package that does something similar. It's more likely you can find someone who's already familiar with the OSS when you need to hire more people as well, rather than having to train someone completely from scratch to get up to speed on an internal propietary project.
AS for job satisfaction, I've been in both cases, working on proprietary software and working making OSS work for companies. Working on OSS is way better and more satisfying in my opinion, and the end pay is pretty much equivalent.
I still say OSS = more and better jobs for developers with an OSS clue. I think there's plenty of room in software for both OSS and non-OSS systems.
Anyone noticed that the 7 person committee includes Dr. Marshall Kirk McKusick (4.2BSD fast filesystem), Eric S. Raymond (loves python), Guido van Rossum (python creator)?
Wonder how that would affect projects that rival those people's projects to get awards? Say, Hans Reiser (reiserfs), or anything related to Perl?
LinuxFund to some extend gives money to potential projects but I find their voting process very poor. Not because it's bad but because few people, not themselves trying to get money, bother voting. The end result is that people that get their friends to go vote on their project get votes and nobody else does. If you really want to help lesser projects I suggest you vote at linuxfund.org and maybe get the LinuxFund credit card.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.