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Open Source Awards 2004

Posted by michael on from the applause dept.

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."

11 of 146 comments (clear)

  1. The Grandmasters and Specials yet to be announced by bc90021 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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! ;)

    --
    libertarianswag.com
  2. What intrigues me... by revolvement · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ...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?

  3. Hall of Shame by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...

  4. My favorite Open Source projects by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  5. Valgrind: an amazing tool by Jorrit · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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,

    --
    Project Manager of Crystal Space (http://www.crystalspace3d.org). Support CS at http://tinyurl.com/cb3x4
    1. Re:Valgrind: an amazing tool by WasterDave · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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

      --
      I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
  6. Re:What a boring lineup... by Jorrit · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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,

    --
    Project Manager of Crystal Space (http://www.crystalspace3d.org). Support CS at http://tinyurl.com/cb3x4
  7. About valgrind by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!!

    1. Re:About valgrind by funkmotor · · Score: 3, Interesting
      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.

  8. Nature of the beast. by Chuck+Chunder · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
    1. Re:Nature of the beast. by Worminater · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.