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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."
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.
If COMDEX were only about OSS, then I think the focus would be more on up-and-coming projects. However, open-source is still very much in the up-and-coming catagory itself and I think that this is a necessary step in order to bring OSS even more into the mainstream.
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?).
...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.
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.