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

The Grandmasters and Specials yet to be announced

[bc90021]

These are the Merit award winners. The Grand Master and Special Awards be announced at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention.

That having been said, these projects definitely deserve their awards. I only have experience with VideoLAN, and it's an awesome piece of software.

The committee allows nominations from the public any time, here, so go nominate your favourite project or Open Source person today! ;)

What intrigues me...

[revolvement]

...is why hasn't something like this been done BEFORE 2003? I mean, it seems like a great idea, so why wasn't there anything available?

Hall of Shame

[Anonymous Coward]

It should also include the hall of shame for the numerous violators of open source licenses... we need not mention names here... the list is long. Sort of like a vendor black list.

Yep, you know who they are... I think what ticks me off the most is these violators don't give money, credit or code back - grifters...

My favorite Open Source projects

[Anonymous Coward]

ImageMagick

K3b

Plone: The most mature open source CMS. http://www.plone.org

Mamboserver: Not as mature or featurefull as Plone, but very nice as well.

OfflineIMAP: Simple, reliable, powerful

Kstars and KDE Technology in general

The ones that are almost there but could use a hand to make them more intuitive:

*GNUCash. Can't wait for their Gtk2 version.
*Mr. Project
*KOffice has a great technological underpinning. Needs a bit of work, but it's already looking very good.

Valgrind: an amazing tool

[Jorrit]

I'm very happy to hear that valgrind won an award. This tool is really a life-saver for anyone developing projects on Linux (with x86). In my project we have solved lots of very hard bugs just by running our program under valgrind. For many of those bugs we were not even aware that they existed in the first place :-)

IMHO valgrind is the single most useful programming tool available on linux. Congratulations to the developers!

Greetings,

Re:Valgrind: an amazing tool

[WasterDave]

Another vote for Valgrind, it's been absolutely wonderful for finding and eliminating memory leak bugs. Not nearly as slow as you would expect it to be either.

I sent the (lead?) developer some email a while back, saying how entirely l33t he is and hoping that somebody somewhere had given him a job using these skills. The answer? Yup. Works for ARM.

Must go, I think there's a dead router. On a Sunday.

Dave

Re:What a boring lineup...

[Jorrit]

Thanks to valgrind (one of the winners), a lot of programs that you probably find useful on linux work a lot better then they would have worked without valgrind. It may not be a program that you would ever use yourselves. But the good effects of that program you can feel in many linux software packages.

Greetings,

About valgrind

[Anonymous Coward]

Valgrind is the only one I use from the list, and, as an user, I must say that it's one of the best tools in my toolbox.

Valgrind has saved so many hours of debugging that I don't think any developer should live without it. If you haven't tried it, give it a shot, it might not help you now but it's surelly a valuable asset to have in your toolbox.

Assuming the others are just as great as Valgrind, I'll surelly give them a try (VideoLAN and JACK, because if you run a gui in linux you probably already run something that uses pango).

Anyway, kudos for the winners!!

Re:About valgrind

[funkmotor]

Congratulations Julian and Valgrind! As the ac says this is a great and valuable tool.

Your code might compile and run, but it might also be full of memory bugs just waiting to crash your program as soon as a user gets hold of it. valgrind will find those holes.

The first memory checking tool I used was insure++ by Parasoft, which, once I realised it's usefulness to debug problems users had encountered, I made it part of the development process and used it in tests to fix the code before it went out. An Insure++ licence is expensive (OK if you can get work to buy one) so I was looking for some OS solution. I had been diassapointed by things like electric fence until I found out about valgrind. (Purify, mentioned in the interview is a similar tool from Rational).

The only negative thing about valgrind is that it works only on ix86, but that is because, as the interview says, it is emulating. If it worked on PPC it would be great but that isn't going to happen. But I don't think it is necessarily a bad thing to write code that will run on Linux as well as your target!

The CLI output from valgrind may look rather confusing at first. But if you are a developer you are probably used to tuning into compiler-speak language to "decode" the errors and warnings out of gcc. valgrind now has a GUI frontend call alleyoop (on sourceforge), although personally I don't use that.

You don't even have to compile with -g or even have to source to run valgrind and have it find memory errors.

valgrind is worthy of an award! Make it part of your toolkit for development and improve the quality of your code. valgrind can improve the quality of our OS code we release. I've used so much Windows software, especially games, that are riddled with memory leaks and bugs, because the developers don't buy Insure++ or Purify. On linux we are lucky, we have valgrind.

Why VLC has "surprising amount" of OS X users

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in the day (around 0.4.x releases) VideoLAN Client was the only solution (for the "Classic Mac User Mindset" people) that:

-Was (and is) easy to install (MPlayerOSX was still at a fledling state, IIRC getting it to work required compiling or something ... remember the "Classic Mac User Mindset"...) VLC provided an easy-to-install bundle file that "just worked" as a Mac User expected things to work.

-Handled just about every media file you got to throw at it, in some cases even better than the official media players (WMV!!!!) While QuickTime was sure to spit blood every time one tried to view a little bit cranky .avi file with it. Pre"doctoring" .avi files is not exactly the great joy and glory, you know...

Now, I don't actually know if MPlayerOSX or QuickTime have actually gotten better in their respective problem areas I just said, mostly because I haven't tried... the VLC "just works". VLC was there with a working solution at a right time and got a good chunk of OSX users. And when one gets accustomed to something, it is likely that one sticks with it as long as it continues to work.

--Just checked MPlayerOSX website. Looking very promising! maybe I should give it a try...

Re:nobel prize?

[kayen_telva]

Noble != Nobel ?

Who says the Nobel is so pure and warm and fuzzy ?
Some of those peeps work on bio, nuclear, and chemical weapons.
Some are involved with cloning.
Some are just real good at math. Big friggin whoopdeedoo.
The makers of VideoLAN will have more of an
impact on my daily life than the guy who solves some math puzzle.
'course, I could be extremely short sighted ;)

Nature of the beast.

[Chuck Chunder]

Closed source apps often have non-obvious names too while they are being developed. It's only when marketing etc get involved that "reasonable" names get tacked on (and then only sometimes, I think you underestimate how hard finding a good name is and I don't see you offering any suggestions for alternatives). However all that happens behind closed doors.

In Open Source however the development is open to the public so a project can quickly become known by the first name it is given. Meanwhile coders aren't going to sit back and stop coding while focus groups and naming comittees mull over a good name. They'll quickly come up with something they are happy with and get on with the business at hand, actually creating the software.

At the end of the days names aren't that important . That's obviously true for infrastructure applications like most of those given these awards that no user needs to ever hear about. Even for end user apps assuming distributers/packagers follow sensible guidelines there should be no issue for end users.

Re:Nature of the beast.

[Worminater]

Have you ever sat in on a naming convention meeting for a large company? Im talking about something with 10-15 people sitting around a table, 2 more teleconfrencing, and 5 more people sitting in from their various conferences sleeping along the side(i was job shawdowing at the time)

I dont know how many stupid acronyms you can go through before you can agree "we shoudlnt use a meaningless acronym(and yes, i know thats an oxymoron)

I think i lasted ten minutes(of what, 2 hours?) before I was fighting like the devil not to pass out.

Ximian

[110010001000]

I would particularly like to congratulate Ximian on their accomplishments this year. Without their work, Linux would not be as usable!

JACK is amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

JACK and its companion, Ardour are what got me to move the last machine in the house, the one in the music studio, off of Windows to Linux. It's professional level software made avalable at no cost.

This is a well-deserved honor for Paul Davis and crew.

Re:So, we're awarding wasted duplication of effort

[Sam H]

For one thing, the GPL only requires you to make source code available to the people who have the binaries. In other words, if you haven't paid, you don't have any right to complain.

I do not fully agree. If I have paid for the binary, I can only complain if the software was given to me with the GPL blurb, otherwise how am I supposed to know that the software is GPL? And even then, I cannot claim any copyright infrigement.

However, if I am the copyright holder of a part of the GPL software (funny, in the case of the Lindows DVD player, I happen to be), then I have a right to complain if the GPL terms are not respected. I asked the Lindows legal service about my concerns a few months ago but never got an answer.

Preach It

[chromatic]

See, there's the problem. The sitting. Oh, and the waiting.

Now I realize, friend, that there ought to be a way for those developers to know you're sitting and waiting and, God willing, someday, someone will be able to reach out of your monitor, shake your hand, and say, "My friends, my brothers and sisters, thank you for your patient, ever-suffering faith! Here, right now, today, glory glory, is that blessed new software you've believed in for so long!" but until that golden, glorious day, we're all just bound, bound and cursed, to be sitting and waiting for those overworked and underthanked developers to get tired of their sitting and their waiting so they can release that wonderful, beautiful new code into our hands.

Or you could thank them for what they've already done and hope it's good motivation to keep working. I'm just saying. Hallelujah.

Re: GPL and copies of copies

[some guy I know]

someone can give a copy to someone else, and then that person can request the source without paying.

Yes, that person can request the source from whoever gave it to him/her, but not necessarily from whoever gave it to whoever gave it to him/her.
If you read your second link carefully, you will see that your friend has to give you a copy of the offer.
Since the offer refers to the entity giving you the copy, it's the person who gave you a copy of the binary (i.e., your friend) who must supply you with a copy of the source.
Whoever gave your friend a copy of the binary must supply your friend with a copy of the source, but need not supply you with a copy.

Disclaimer: IANALADPTBO (... and don't pretend to be one), but that's how I interpret it.

Re: GPL and copies of copies

[some guy I know]

After rereading the above, I feel that I should clarify: I meant providing a copy without charge, as described in section 3a of the GPL.
If the third party gave your friend a copy of the source along with the binary, that third party is not responsible for providing you with a copy of the source code if your friend gives you a copy of the binary without the source.

I screwed up in applying this reasoning to your second link, which was actually refering to section 3b, not 3a.
However, section 3b does allow the original distributor of the binary to charge a nominal fee for a copy of the source, so the you can't request the source "without paying".
(Well, actually, you can request it, but the original distributor doesn't have to honor the request.)

Sorry for the mixup.