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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."
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.
You had to sign up for a (free) O'Reilly account. You could only vote for 3. I voted for KDE, OOo, and GIMP...
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!).
...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.
Top amount of votes was only 1690. Pretty good amount, but really I would expect more...
Well, they had to throw out a bunch of votes for this project; no one could figure out how they got there in the first place...
Jay (=
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!
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.
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 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.
In a survey done by EDC KDE is used by 65% of Linux developers, while GNOME is used by 56% (some overlap). So I'd guess that KDE's userbase is a bit larger --- remember a lot of Linux users are European, and the biggest distro there (SuSE) is very KDE-centric. Overall, I'd guess KDE has a slightly larger userbase.
:)
The other reason is probably that KDE users are rabid, frothing-at-the-mouth maniacs. In my experience, they're much more enthusiastic than GNOME users. Compare the popularity of dot.kde.org vs gnomedesktop.org (the major news sites for each desktop) and the popularity of kdelook.org vs the popularity of art.gnome.org.
PS> I say the above as a KDE user
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
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 !