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?

Re:What intrigues me...

[SlashdotLemming]

...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?

Because, man, you never got off your lazy ass and did it!! Everyone was like waiting and waiting for you, but nadda. Someone finally got sick of waiting and put it together. And now its here. What the hell is your problem, slack-off?

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.

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."

valgrind

[badcherry]

I don't know how, but I've never heard of or used valgrind before. I am using it right now and OMG, this is so much easier than hunting for memeory bugs! My life just got easier. Thanks valgrind!

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:nobel prize?

[Tom7]

There is a nobel prize for literature, but none for computer science. Which makes the biggest difference to humanity?

I think I gotta go with literature on this one. Anway, computer scientists have the Turing award, which is basically the same thing.

Also, hacking linux apps and libraries isn't really computer science, although it is useful itself. Certainly these contributions are not of the scale and import as nobel-prize winning breakthroughs.

Re:What a boring lineup...

[Espectr0]

Do you watch DVD's with any program in linux?
Then you use videolan technology, as they are the ones who developed libdvdcss.

Do you use any gnome program that can work in any language? Probable you use pango too.

Do you use mozilla or similar? Then you should now it is debugged with Valgrind

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

[Jorrit]

Well the links on this article explain what it does (i.e. the interview with the author of valgrind). I can explain it quickly though. Basically it emulates the x86 cpu and runs your program under very close inspection. By doing that it can discover various bugs or suspicious things while your program is running. It can find out that your program is reading or writing to memory where it shouldn't read or write. It can find out when your program is trying to use variables that haven't been initialized yet (haven't got a value yet). It can find out about memory that isn't released properly. And a lot more. It also has a cpu cache analyzer tool.

In short, valgrind manages to find many bugs in programs and gives you the information so you can actually solve those bugs.

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,

Re:I nominate GROKLAW.NET

[lxs]

Then I will nominate Darl McBride in the fiction category.

Reason:
Most creative interpretation of the GPL.

bully pulpit

[ir0b0t]

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?

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.

I'd like to extend my thanks to...

[LighthouseJ]

Brian Wellington and Matias Duarte.

Who is Brian Wellington and Matias Duarte you say? Well, they are the creators of XBill and let me get out so much aggression. Go pick up the latest copy for your favorite platform.

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

[Sam H]

Now we're stuck with two debuggers (Valgrind and gdb) each having stunted functionality. Why didn't the people in charge of Valgrind put their effort into improving gdb (and taking advantage of the already present infrastructure at no added cost)?

Simply because the "present infrastructure" did not allow to easily implement an x86 virtual machine into gdb. But valgrind and gdb work perfectly together, see for instance the --gdb-attach flag in valgrind.

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?

My thoughts...

[singularity]

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).

Re:Wrong.

[NoOneInParticular]

Don't know about the other ones, but valgrind is a life-saver for development. It is a tremendous help to any kind of C/C++ development on linux/x86, and has helped developers for linux platforms to create much more robust and stable code. Without tools like these, stuff like OpenOffice can only advance at a much lower pace.

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.

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

Re:Wrong.

[RML]

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.

Re:The Grandmasters and Specials yet to be announc

[RML]

Only one of those names gives me any semblance of a clue of what it might do.

Valgrind, okay, I'll give you that one. The name is from Nordic mythology, as explained in an interview with Julian Seward. It actually makes a bit of sense if you know what it means.

VideoLAN is obvious.

JACK is used to connect audio programs together. The name makes sense to me.

Pango, well, I got the name immediately, and I think it's a perfect description. But I admit that many people won't understand a combination of Greek and Japanese roots meaning "all languages".

they're called HYPERLINKS

[Anonymous Coward]

It took me all of 2 minutes with Google trying to find links for all the software you mentioned - and greatly enriches your post.

Other than that, thanks for the pointers.

====

ImageMagick

K3b - DVD/CD burner software

Plone - The most mature open source CMS.

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.

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.

Yes valgrind!

[Tom7]

Man, valgind is so great. I don't know how anyone can bear programming in C or C++ without it.

Re:The Grandmasters and Specials yet to be announc

[JoeBuck]

JACK = JACK Audio Connection Kit. It's a recursive acronym, like GNU (GNU's Not Unix).