Slashdot Mirror
Winners of O'Reilly's COMDEX Contest Anounced
Alexander Limi writes: "The winners of the O'Reilly "Open Source Goes to COMDEX" Contest have been announced. The lucky ones are: GNOME, KDE, OpenOffice, Zope, GIMP and our own project, Plone. Congratulations to all the deserving projects! Check out the announcement here."
I work for O'Reilly and am therefore posting anonymously. While this was done on purpose, it was by a sole author, and not a decision by O'Reilly. That developer has since got a first post.
OMG, How could they forget about [Insert Project Name Here] or [Insert Project Name Here] or [Insert Project Name Here] or [Insert Project Name Here].
Comdex isnt for another few weeks, how can somebody have won a prize already?
Stupid open sores fuktards, check your CALENDAR!
Top amount of votes was only 1690. Pretty good amount, but really I would expect more... I mean a slashdot poll had 20000 responses for the top choice!!
Is anyone surprised that the six most well-known (not necessarily "the best", althought I do love them all) projects are the ones that were voted in? Projects that people "in-the-know" (hopefully those going to COMDEX) will already know about? Where are the smaller projects, or other ideas/programs, so they can receive more mainstream publicity?
I'm honestly not trying to troll here, but just wondering why KDE would be sent, for example, rather than a lesser-known OSS project.
topreacher@signature.slashdot.org 1% rm -rf sig
Plone is built on Zope, so Zope really wins twice.
From a user who uses every piece of software on that list, I have to disagree.
Sure KDE was a winner - but number one in the vote tally was Plone. Why? Becuase Plone has a large, enthusiastic community. Plone is faily new in the grand scheme of things, compared to these other projects. Why Plone got the most votes is that it has a lot of the most "finishing work" of many projects - it will be a good ambassador for open-source products and frameworks.
Sure, the KDE, GIMP, GNOME, and OpenOffice folks have been around for a while, and obviously get in on both quality and recognition, but it's important to see that Zope and Plone also are getting a lot of deserved attention at the same level as these other four well-known open-source projects.
Visibilty of Open Source products can only be beneficial and certainly this venue adds credibility.
One must wonder though if the impact is wasted on the big exhibitors who are there to hawk their wares.
I mean, do you think Bill Gates is going to stop by, then turn around and say "Ballmer, we need to go open source!"
Nonetheless, I'd applaud a change in the tactics of Open Source that resulted in enough commercialization to do three things:
1. Allow more developers to earn a continuing stream of revenue for all their work as it is recognized as a viable and legitimate alternative to the shrink-wrap boxes in the stores today.
2. Put some downward price pressure on the current Windows software market. WinXP Pro is $200+ to a consumer but $40 to an OEM? And Office at over $400? Come on! Most "shareware" apps go for around $20!
3. Encourage a greater cooperation by MS when developers seek timely and full disclosure of APIs etc. necessary to build Windows apps. And in the absence of this cooperation, create a genuine market for equivalent retail alternatives for OSs other than Windows. Basically, if MS won't play ball, folks have an easy switch to make without having to change hardware.
Is it just me, or does plone (minus the tabs) look like just about every other opensource CMS site around? It seems like eventually a new design would break the CMS mold and not go for the choices on the sides, content down the middle look.
You forgot to say something derogatory about teh GIMP (I'm assuming the "disaster of Open Source" was OpenOffice, thats certainly how I'd describe it). But it is impossible to use, and still lacks enterprise-grade color management.
1. Open source on the desktop is an important issue, regardless of where you come down on it.
2. Zope's scalability is more transparent than any other app server or CMS product on the market today. With ZEO clustering coming with little/no need to write extra code to make your deployment scale-out, this is a win. Add to that mature caching frameworks and provend interoperability, the above post is definitely uninformed.
3. These projects represent an important open-source future, just as much as they represent the present. Eveyone already knows about the Kernel and Apache. This is an opportunity for these important projects to show their stuff and move open source software "up the stack" to higer levels (don't underestimate how important this is to the future of open-source!).
With the possible exception of Plone (just heard of it today) all of the other people involved, would have been going to comdex already..
...that Plone's UI (esp. in 2.0 beta) is modular. It is Section 508 and W3C WAI compliant. It also can be rendered on mobile-phones, large-format, and presentation/print CSS devices without need for ANY changes to the HTML output or multiple sets of templates. From an architecture and extensibility standpoint, Plone's UI is really best-in-class. It also has the largest and most diverse audience and user-base of any open-source CMS, as well as formal standards for process improvement (the PLIP process), which definitely aides in the UI development/refinement process.
But the fact that KDE and Gnome are going to be there isn't something silly? It will prove the tendancy of the linux community to fragment, which isn't a good thing.
But again, a very good thing for Zope!
I swear, the people who create these projects should be beaten:
==
(1) GIMP
gimp - n : disability of walking due to crippling of the legs or feet [syn: lameness, limping, gimpiness, gameness, claudication]
(2) GNOME
gnome - A dwarf; a goblin; a person of small stature or misshapen features, or of strange appearance.
==
Am I to gather that combined they form a small crippled old man? Yessir, those names sure make *me* want to use those products...
This contest doesnt seem to have any merit.
:P
Who wants a popularity contest?
It would be much more interesting to find some smaller interesting projects that might not have 'made it' so far yet and give them the chance.
OpenOffice is already given much more support than it deserves
Well, I'm glad KDE got chosen. With the upcoming 3.2 release approaching, it's a good opportunity for the KDE guys to show how good a Linux desktop can be, and that the idea of Linux on the desktop is not so farfetched anymore.
Au Contraire!
The tendancy of the Linux community to fragment is an extremely good thing! If we have no external competition, we'll make our own.
Competition is good, it prevents stagnation. Evolution slows to a crawl without competition. Competition gets people excited, and there's nothing I'd rather see than two groups of extremely talented people competing head to head to see who can make me happier.
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
gosh.
:|
all the awarded software, exception made for gimp, is bloatware.
I just had a look at the Plone site and I like it.
Can we have Slashdot in Plone now please?
Seriously though, it would make a great CMS migration case study.
This Like That - fun with words!
Excellent news. I've been using zope and plone for a few months now for intranet projects at my employer, and I am very, very impressed with that software stack. The plone 2.0 betas illustrate the the Plone team has some extremely talented UI people. I look forward to reading more about these technologies.
Make fun of "buzzwords" if you will, but getting open-source into government and private-enterprise that works with government is important, and lack of accessibility is a deal-breaker for those kinds of projects. Standards are important to doing business with technology - that's the process you go through to generate something called money (perhaps you've heard of this, no?).
But DON'T, for God's sake, tell fans of the products that they projects might benefit from name upgrades, nooo. You're assaulted with logic like: "Screw you, bastard! I've been using Splong for two years, and it's the best thing ever and marketing should be called moroning and Splong is a cool name anyway and you're just stoopid, you cocksucking ape!"
No. I gave up. My next open source work is going under a goofy name. Oh, and I'll sue anyone that tries to use Splong.
Chr0m0Dr0m!C
Hey Vietnam is back so we might as well just repeat all the other stuff too...
So all you guys that signed up for the reserves for a little college money ready to ship out and get shot at with rocket propelled grenades every night or what? woohoo, fun...
...of the development process. Projects with vibrant, enthusiastic communities will tend to exceed, both socially, and technically. This is one of Plone and Zope's greatest assets. So, if you think of it this way, it is more than a mere "popularity" contest - it is a measure of dedication, enthusiasm, caring, and a bit of zealotry (not in a bad way) - these are good leading indicators as the the strength of the product via its support mechanism and community.
Ladies and Gentleman, we are very pleased to announce the winners, as you voted, for the projects that will be attending Comdex at the "Open Source Pavillion":
(Or is this supposed to be some kind of joke?)
What you actually expected a pampered rich boy who hid out in texas during vietnam and had everything handed to him by daddy (like baseball teams, sports cars, mansions, yale degree, etc.) was actually going to do a good job?!
Oh and he was fucking born in god damn NEW YORK, he's not a cowboy he's a fucking DUDE, he can't even ride a fucking HORSE, even Clinton could do that! Even VLADIMIR PUTIN can do that! So put your macho fantasies somewhere else you southern fascists.
31. You think that linux cannot crash.
We'll my linux box has been up for the past 136 days and I can assure you it definat
Is it just me, or did anybode else wonder the order of the winners in the story?
I mean, it isn't alphabetical, it isn't ordered by the amount of votes. Mentioning Plone last because it has a comment attached is reasonable, but moving GNOME from the bottom of the list in front of KDE and preserving the order otherwise was odd.
The first thought that occurred to me was "so, the GNOME seems to have beaten KDE", so I was slightly surprised when I read the O'Reilly announcement.
http://codeandlife.com
I voted a few times in the contest. My votes were for OpenOffice.org, Audacity, and VNC. Both VNC and OpenOffice.org (especially!) have made my job easier and saved a lot of money in my overwhelmingly Windows workplace. Audacity is just great, and fun. Aside from my personal like of the programs, they all share the feature that they are cross-platform. It doesn't seem so useful to me to go to a conference showcasing your software, then when its all said and done, someone realized they would have to change their operating system just to use it. Anyone interested in Linux has at least passing knowledge of Gnome and KDE and if they were to obtain Linux, they will almost certainly be using one of them. Maybe the reason for bringing Gnome and KDE is really to promote Linux as a whole, which is fine. For me personally, though, a program that is free is great, and a program that is free AND I can share it with my friends regardless of their computing environment is even better.
I noticed that KDE has more than twice the number of votes that GNOME does (in fact KDE came 2nd whilst GNOME came 6th). Either this means KDE has a lot more users than GNOME or it means that KDE users are much more enthusiastic about their desktop than GNOME users (and hence more likely to vote for said desktop). Actually I must admit, I wonder if there are any statistics on the popularity of GNOME vs the popularity of KDE. As far as I can tell all of the major distros except Red Hat come with KDE as the default desktop, but then again Red Hat is by far the most popular distribution in the mainstream...
Okay, so it's a content management system... I get that. What I'm curious about is whether Plone would be useful for things on a small scale -- for instance, a site that has a few (maybe five) people who can update it, and require no review or workflow to do so. Is it good for this, or is it too complicated for simple needs?
I hate to say this, but two of the selections seem to have the primary purpose of duplicate functionality found in proprietary applications. Should we really be celebrating pieces of software that while powerful, really don't provide anything remotely new or original, and are basically knockoffs of MS and Adobe products (although OO's embrace of XML is kind of cool)?
It almost seems as though those two selections help to validate many of the criticisms that have been made regarding the open-source model: namely that it lacks true innovation. Many projects, including some of the selections prove such suggestions to be false. I just think it's a shame that projects have been included that have really contributed very little to the advancement of the field.
Plone obviously scales well, but is also very easy to use for quickly getting started with small-group content management. Consider this:
Looking at Windows and it's software packages to Linux Distros and packages all I can say is "They are all full of holes!"
Some software packages have more security problems than others. Sendmail is about as insecure as Outlook Express is. As long as we are traveling down this slippery slope. . .
The main reason that BSD has been so successful at avoiding security holes is by default almost every package is installed with every feature turned off. BSD can be rooted just like any other OS when misconfigured. I just wish Microsoft would take a hint and ship Windows with that stupid messaging service turned off.
2) I tend to meta-mod about half the troll mods as being unfair. Many troll posts are people who write something that could be valid, but they don't back up what they write with examples, proofs, rationals, whatever and are just plain rude. People tend to ignore posts that say "You have problems. . ." or "Nothing will get past that shit that fills your head,. . ." or are simply off topic.
3) Windows 2K does not seem to support my soundcard. Linux does. Sure this is the exception, but it's my exception :) More and more companies are providing drivers for linux so if you know what you are doing finding parts that work with Linux is not that dificult. Newbies are still kinda screwed in this department unless they got something like RedHat/RootHat/NewbieHat that detects everything for them.
4) I like Mac, Dos, Linux, but not Windows. If you want to know why, ckick here.
5) I actually know of a highschool that uses linux thin-clients. Yes, the school's admin is a Linux uber-geek. Linux is also good at word processing, instant messaging, gimp is kinda like mspaint.exe on steroids, playing a few games and that's about all I do.
6) Most people I have talked to already know about Linux, even the ones who don't like computers. Maybe where I live is the exception. Um, what does knowing about an OS have to do with if it is good or not?
7) I have no idea what you mean by "professional printing capabilities." I use CUPS and it works fine with my DeskJet 712C printer.
8) Why compile when I can type apt-get install package-name?
9) I have not ever looked into professional desktop publishing for Linux. I guess I could just use ClarisWork 2.0 for my Mac.
10) I just heard something about a Linux video editing package at sourceforge.net. I have no idea if it requires the pure use of your left mind over your right mind, but I don't do video editing so I dont care. Actually I know more people who do video editing on Macs than Windows.
11) I have been very happy playing Heritic II on Linux and xScorch rules! Okay, in general Windows is better at being a toy than Linux. Happy? Keep in mind that some games will not run under some newer versions of Windows.
12) Most people do not understaind their OS. That's what seperates most people from those who don't have a life. (Sorry, I just couldn't help it.) I have yet to meet a Linux zealot who is too dumb to understand Windows.
13) I have no problems pointing and clicking or "wading through cryptic scripts written by lunatics." I do have a problem wading throught cryptic scripts written by other lunatics. Actually looking at other people's scripts is a good way to learn what to do and what not to do.
14) "Nothing will get past that shit that fills your head, you will not admit to any facts."
Now you are just being rude.
15) If you think the naming in Linux is weird then don't ever download MINIX. Okay, so Linux has oddly named devices. Windows has cryptic named system files. I'm sure it seemed like a good idea at the time.
16) The only media technology of Microsoft I have ever used is me
Yoda? Ya ya ya ya ya Yoda?
> I CRAPpED MY PANTs AN HOUR AGO, AND I DON't EVEN CARE!!!!1
I sincerely think this should get post-of-the-year award.
what is [Insert Project Name Here] doing on the list?!?! Only people of questionable parentage and sexual habits use it!!!
Good Point's, however WINE has been in beta for about a decade now (I Believe the project started in early '93) I dont believe it's going to ever go final :P
That being said, however, I have had excellent experience with WINE, it run's all major application's with minor annoyances if you are willing to spend a little time configuring it. (Ie I run Dreamweaver, MSN Messenger [amsn doesnt work behind the proxy here], and several other program's with almost no issue)
-Gwala
#!/bin/csh cat $0
GNOME won the most unintuitive GUI award and the worst overall window manger award.
I tihnk you confused us with people who give a shit what you have.
It is great for Plone, in fact I voted a lot for plone!
Anyway, anyone knows when are the plone conferences going to be digitzed? I CANN'T WAIT!
Done, it's called Zope Zen.
Seriously though, it would make a great CMS migration case study
Speaking about case studies, check available docs, alive borads and screenshots for NeoBoard and CMFBoard. As you can see - both are developing in the same direction (kind of mixing Slashdot and PHPBB ideas), and both have already achived very similar quality and functionality levels, dispite the fact that CMFBoard was mostly developed from scratch (although under strong influence of many ideas from other available boards), while NeoBoard was re-written from PHP to Plone by the original PHP developer of the original PHP-based NeoBoard.
Less is more !
Seriously. I thought they were bankrupt (the local paper had a story about a former Comdex marketing rep reduced to selling Tupperware).
Indeed. I am historically a GNOME user (KDE never felt right for me), but I got a new Dell laptop a few days ago, installed Slack on it, and tried out the new KDE 3.2 beta on it (instead of installing Dropline GNOME on it, like I usually do.)
And, I have to say, -holy shit-. KDE 3.2 has a lot of things going for it. Konqueror, especially, has become one of the best programs in Linux. It starts up almost instantaneously now, and Apple's changes to khtml have really seemed to make it a much better and speedier web browser. I haven't even needed to touch Firebird in the last few days.
The Plastik theme included with KDE 3.2 is also great- it's the first KDE theme I actually find visually appealing. I actually like it a bit better than Industrial now (my former favorite). They have many of the same design elements, but Plastik is slightly less flat. It still gets out of the way and looks great.
The beta was beta quality however, and I noticed a few bugs. If these get fixed, the KDE team has a new convert in me when 3.2 final is out!
You aren't AnimeFreak either. Why are you using his e-mail address?
I voted a few times in the contest.
Let me guess, you work for Diebold, right?
-- MarkusQ
Uh, no. That info is there because I have posted about using Windows and Linux I want to make it clear that I am not some nutjob or zealot who installed GNU/Linux 5 years ago and haven't touched a Windows box ever since.
BTW, please don't ever give a shit. Please keep your shit to yourself. :p