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."

Comments

And now you heave heard of them.

[IvyMike]

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.

Re:The Grandmasters and Specials yet to be announc

[Narchie Troll]

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."

nobel prize?

[damacer]

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.

Re:photoshop, poser, word, visual basic

[Haeleth]

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?

More of this sort of thing needed

[Chemical Serenity]

I've seen a lot of people comment (well, piss and moan really) about the fact that they:

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...

... nah. :D