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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.
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!).
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 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.