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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."
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.
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
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!).
Actually, if the CMF was considered, zope would win 3 times. Wait, if python was considered, it would have won 4 times! Incredible!
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!
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...