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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."

14 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! ;)

  2. 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...

  3. 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.

  4. And now you heave heard of them. by IvyMike · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  5. Re:The Grandmasters and Specials yet to be announc by Narchie+Troll · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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."

  6. nobel prize? by damacer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  7. Re:What a boring lineup... by Espectr0 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  8. 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 Jorrit · · Score: 5, Informative

      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,

      --
      Project Manager of Crystal Space (http://www.crystalspace3d.org). Support CS at http://tinyurl.com/cb3x4
  9. 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
  10. Re:I nominate GROKLAW.NET by lxs · · Score: 5, Funny

    Then I will nominate Darl McBride in the fiction category.

    Reason:
    Most creative interpretation of the GPL.

  11. 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!!

  12. Re:photoshop, poser, word, visual basic by Haeleth · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

  13. More of this sort of thing needed by Chemical+Serenity · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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

    --
    "People will pay big bucks for the luxury of ignorance."