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Open Source Awards 2004
An anonymous reader writes "The first Open Source Awards 2004 have been announced. These newly created awards aspire to be the Nobel Prizes of the open source world. Congratulations to the developers of Valgrind, VideoLAN, JACK, and Pango."
You've hit the nail on the head. 4 apps that I don't care about and can't see why I would.
Don't get me wrong. They are cool for their EXTREMELY niche environment. But this was the best they could come up with?!?
I would I haven't heard of any of these.
Yes, these are projects that have less fame than Openoffice. Isn't that cool? You just learned about four great new pieces of software rather than hearing about Openoffice for the millionth time. Sweet.Excel. Access.
Acrobat. FrameMaker.
Flash. Shockwave. Dreamweaver.
This is not limited to open-source software whatsoever.
In any case, Pango is not user-level software; it is a library. JACK is essentially the same. Valgrind is also developer software.
I don't see what's wrong with the name Xouvert. "X-Open."
While it's really nice to see stuff like this where those who have done alot for open source are acknowledged and applauded, doesn't it seem a bit pretentious to compare it to the 'noble prize'?
That is, isn't the noble prize reserved for those who make a massive contribution to science and/or human wellfare? In this case, there are probably only a very very small handful of people who should receive a noble-like oss reward (e.g. Linus, RMS). And, from the list of people who receive rewards it doesn't seem like they are only limiting them selves to such individuals.
These have real potential for communicating a simple message of what "open source" means to non-coders. Unfortunately, I could not discern what that message might be from the site. Also, I'm not familiar enough with the award-winners to understand the significance of their projects within the context of the overall message.
There is a reason these folks were singled out that should resonate beyond the consoles of the like-minded. That reason should state plainly the importance of open source to the mission of civilization overall: service to the higher ideas of truth, freedom and better flavors of ice cream.
But what is that message? And in language that I (or other person with developmentally-delayed level programming knowledge) can understand?
I'm laughing at clouds.
The grandparent poster was NOT saying that there were no windows programs with silly names; but that there are no OSS programs with sensible names.
I suppose things like ImageMagick, Sendmail, and OpenOffice don't count?
One program that I use daily that does not get a lot of mention is Adium, a GPLed AIM client on the Mac.
The older version, v1.6.x series, has a few cosmetic problems under Panther (works perfectly under Jaguar), but in general is outstanding. Why anyone would use the AOL client under OS X with Adium and iChat available is beyond me. The only thing that iChat has going for it over Adium is the video conferencing feature.
Highly configurable, easy to use, and has a great feature set.
v2.0, now in late-alpha, looks to be even better, going to a modular protocol backend, meaning it can do AIM/MSN/etc.
I have used VideoLan Client on OS X and really like that, as well. It opens about 98% of the files that MPlayer can handle, and has an interface that is leaps and bounds beyond MPlayer (for a good example of how *not* to write an OS X interface, check out MPlayer for OS X).
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
I've worked with many bounds/integrity checking programs, both on windows and linux, commercial and otherwise, and oddly enough valgrind beats them hands down in quality.
a) Never heard of these things, and
b) Would probably never use them
Obviously the criteria for choosing these tools as being worthy of mention isn't based on how sexy they are, it's based on how USEFUL they are.
OSS development still suffers from an excess of people wanting to work on the 'sexy' code... the things that blink and humm and make people go 'wow cool', and a deficit of coders willing to slug it out on the basic, relatively un-sexy tools that make those other things possible. Giving kudos to people who take the time to build solid and dependable frameworks enhances OSS and software generally, and imo deserves more recognition than they currently get.
Who knows, maybe they can encourage a shift in young coder minds that building solid tools can be sexy too...
"People will pay big bucks for the luxury of ignorance."
four obscure flash-in-the-pan programs which do nothing to advance the cause of Free Software are getting a brief bit of exposure.
Obscure? To you, maybe. Flash-in-the-pan? Definitely not. And don't advance Free Software? All of them (except maybe JACK, which I've never heard of before) have improved OS/FS enormously. Valgrind is just amazing - although you may never have heard of it, the chances are you use daily a program that it's debugged. Pango makes using multiple languages actually easier on Linux than Windows in my experience. VideoLAN, well, try it yourself.
Human/Ranger/Zangband
Man, valgind is so great. I don't know how anyone can bear programming in C or C++ without it.
If you've ever used KDE or Mozilla, then you've used something that has been improved by valgrind. I'm sure there a lot of others too.