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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.
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].
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.
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.
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...
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.
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
...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?)
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:
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.
Normally, to go to comdex costs money, something that many of these projects do not have. This will show the true interest in OSS by comdex participants. If good, then next year, will most likely include a great deal more including many of the smaller ones. Hopefully, a booth is set up with a panel about these smaller projects.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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).
I voted a few times in the contest.
Let me guess, you work for Diebold, right?
-- MarkusQ