Slashdot Mirror
Second quarter Open Source Awards announced
JohnGrahamCumming writes "The Open Source Initiative has announced its Q2 award winners here. Three people/projects got $500 Merit Awards: Martin Pool for distcc, Tom Lord for GNU Arch and The GIMP. OSI is currently looking for nominations for the Q3 awards to be announced at OSCON."
And who said Open Source can't be financially rewarding...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Congratulations to all honest winners! Keep up the great work!
The GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program: a piece of software suitable for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. ...Jeeze and all these years I thought the GIMP was that frightening leather-clad psycho in Pulp Fiction. That dude still gives me nightmares!
So, let me get this straight. Open Source awards are given out 4 times a year. Why so ofter? Doens't that downplay the importance of the awards.
Evolution or ID?
The SCO lawsuits have certainly acted as a catalist to begin the maturation of the open sourse community. Hopefully it will grow to include a non tolerance of pirates and other thieves.
"OSI is currently looking for nominations for the Q3 awards to be announced at OSCON."
I nominate these (wide) open sourcers from Washington state.I'd like to thank Linus, and Richard--This one's for you, Richard!--and the brave guys and gals at CollabNet. And for those of you just getting started, I'd like to say... this trophy is worth more than all the stock options I ever received!
The CB App. What's your 20?
Autotrace is a program that converts bitmaps to vector drawings: http://autotrace.sourceforge.net/
Imgseek classifies bitmap images based on similarity . http://imgseek.sourceforge.net/
Both would be awesome if converted into libraries used by other programs.
No-one has done more for open source this year than Eric S. Raymond. He picked apart SCO's arguments against Linux and rallied Sun to open up Java.
I think they should consider nominating pearpc
pearpc.sourceforge.net because that project acommplished what many people tought to be imposible.I mean a ppc emulator that runs OSX deserves a prize.
Glad to see GIMP getting an award. The new version is excellent on Windows XP, too. Amazing! If you need a program to edit photos, GIMP is all you need.
I'd give all awards to whoever takes The Gimp and makes an usable interface for it. I keed, I keed...
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
CoLinux is interesting too. It allows you to run Linux natively, side by side with Windows, at kernel-level. That beats emulators hands-down.
It should get nominated.
It would seem to me that the awards go to people/teams that have created great Open Source software, not evangelists.
I could be wrong though.
Im sure some people here will claim $500 isnt a lot of money, but its programmers were talking about here - imagine how much ramen that is !
It would be nice if they could (a) increase the number, and (b) increase the monetary value of the awards. But, with what money?
I have no idea (and I did read a bit) how they manage their money, other than their 503(c) status and necessary government reporting. Do they have an endowment, or do they rely on annual donations to cover the annual (and quarterly) awards?
I would hope they have an endowment. If so, It'd be nice to know how one could make small (less than $100!) donations to the endowment. After all, if lots of little guys would start giving to funds like this*, than they could give out mo'bigger awards, resulting in more media coverage as well as help fund good coders in future projects.
So... do they have an endowment? Do they accept small donations to help fund this endowment? Anybody got details?
* as well as the EFF and other "goods"
Support a few technologists in Washington.
No, OSI does no have an endowment. The money for the OSAs is through corporate sponsorship which you can read about here.
You can always buy some Open Source Swag if you feel like helping out.
John.
I'll have to practice up, and become far more hardcore, before I can join in with all the cool kids trying to justify their empty wallets, when something free could have done the job just as well.
Tom's been struggling financially for a while, and even had to stop developing Arch because he didn't have enough funds. Arch is the only open source revision control system that is comparable to BitKeeper. Subversion may be an improvement on CVS, but it's nowhere near as comprehensive as Arch or BK. Incidentally, even Larry McVoy admits that Arch has the potential to be even better than BK. The current difference is that BK is much more polished and production ready.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Just because one of the selling points of Arch (on a GNU site) is that BK is unfree doesn't mean that this is the extent of its usefulness. Go read up on the wiki or elsewhere.
You might note, by the way, that the gnu.org Arch site is not the primary Arch site (certainly not the most frequently updated), though that's the one linked by the article. (www/wiki).gnuarch.org are Arch's primary frontends to the world.
the "kernel developers use an unfree VC system" argument shows up only on the frontpage of the gnu.org Arch site, and not on the frontpage of either of the others.
Hey - don't rain on these guy's fifteen minutes.
That's about all they'll ever get out of this.
I'd like to nominate Wilhelm IV for open sourcing Beer back in 1516.
#include "barley"
#include "hops"
#include "water"
#include "yeast"
The Neo-Bohemian Techno-Socialist
My time and work are too valuable to just give away for free.
Then don't give them away for free, you fuckwit. Stick with writing stuff you actually need or want for yourself. Reply to dumb requests with "where's my patch, bitch?"
In case you were wondering, Mercatur's guestbook is not working at the moment. She has just announced this on her homepage.
Come on, we all knew that was bound to happen sooner or later.
I urge you all to email her with your suggestions and offers of help.
Thank you and I'm sure we can get through this difficult time if we give her our support.
Or maybe we should just leave the poor girl alone for a while and do some good old fashioned trolling on Slashdot. I mean, you have to admit, with all that censoring stuff going on now, the guestbook isn't as funny as it was anymore. The best comments always seem to be gone before I can read them.
Sincerely,
"rrrrroar" (exact number of Rs unknown)
PS: This is the third mercatur post I spotted here. I'm good. The fact that I clicked on this stupid "Open Sauce Awards" story says a lot about how boring this day is, though.
An interesting development in the current Canadian election is that at least one party, The Green Party of Canada, seems to be paying attention to geeks this time around. The Green Party of Canada endorses open source software in the Science and Technology section of their platform. Some of their promises include:
Would you add, change or remove anything, make your wish list. It seems like we are making politicians wake up and smell the coffee.
ESR just takes ideas of countless other people, runs them through agenda and ego, and evangelizes on the foreign foe he announces that was mis-quoted for a past "current" opinion on the state of Linux. It's just like 10 years ago, when someone was asked if Linux was a well-made kernel of an operating system and they said it wasn't. ESR just builds off the previous nonsense. Sure, 10 years ago someone said such, but time elapses, software improves in due course, people change, evaluations give new evidence or desire, and the market reflects the prosperity.
It's like ESR is stuck in the past; sure someone in elementary school may have labeled ESR a bad child for dis-obeying his parents, yet that doesn't mean he will be the same bad child in time later. That is the criteria ESR suspends above every corporate executives head. Is ESR's current acceptance as an Open Source Advocate qualify him to return to every company and kill whomever that doesn't have the sacrificial penguin blood above their front-door? ESR's career is built upon such and not forgiveness. Many non-ESR Linux advocates are trying to combat against ESR in leu of past reactions to in-development software. There is no need to criticize anyone for non-acceptance of ESR's belief, just return the idea after it matures and market the idea for what desire bloomed its thesis.
ESR is the anti-Linux and ante-Open Source Advocate in many respects. People like ESR: all they desire is skirmishes with their fellow brethren as that is how one exceeds into higher rank on the slaveship we all know as Planet Earth. It is wise to not be angry at ESR except the hellspawn that raises such beasts...wickedness in mankind.
ESR...gotta love him and hope him well. One archer to the next, saying "That's a verry well-made bow; I hope you need not fire your arrows any time soon..."
Also, the Linux Penguin sucks as a logo and a mascot. Boring, immature and overused. Boxes with penguins on them belong on the shelves at Toys-R-Us, next to Hungry Hungry Hippos. Get him a job selling sugar coated breakfast serial or something, and pick a mascot that's not sickeningly cute.
Linux needs a new mascot, and GIMP needs a new name.
You know the reason why: because you're an idiot who asks stupid questions instead of writing useful code.
You asked me to think about it and tell you. I did, and now you know, so go do something about it.
I applaud your perceptiveness sir.
Mercatur has always deleted posts that she didn't like. This is nothing new.
Please, I urge you to continue working towards the ultimate goal: to see Alice naked. One day she'll show us those titties on her webcam... one day!
www.mercatur.net
Martin made it much easier for me to come out. When I ran across his mailing lists and found how casually he could joke about these things, and how nobody else seemed offended or attacked him for it, I was floored.
Say what you will about the open software community. Some people may be hot tempered, some may be exclusionary or quick to criticize, but I've yet to find a group so willing to accept people from all walks of life.
Thanks to more than Martin and OSI. Thank you to everyone for making open source a true open community!
Yes, writing the first version was fun, but then answering user email messages, or adding little features that I didn't care about got monotonous and boring.
Don't do it then. Duh.
If it hurts, you're doing it wrong.
While it's nice to see GIMP getting an award, GIMP is NOT all you need.
It lacks 16-bit-per-color (48-bpp) editing support.
"Why is this stupid feature necessary?", you ask?
It's needed because of cameras like the Canon EOS-300D/10D (see the other slashdot article). Canon's RAW format is wonderful for people who need to squeeze every last ounce of performance out of their camera, at the expense of possibly tedious, extra post-processing. RAW gives you more headroom to avoid blown highlights (along with a possibly higher S/N ratio), and more shadow detail, among other things. Canon's in-camera JPEG processing also seems to throw away nearly half (yes, supposedly "one-half") of the sensor's dynamic range, whereas you get access to the full range with RAW. Unfortunately, GIMP can only handle 8-bits per color (24-bpp), and RAW requires 16-bit (well, 12-bits, actually, as Canon's RAW only has 12-bits per color). What's worse is that, if you read the GIMP lists, 16-bit support is probably years away (I think someone mentioned "2006, maybe").
Cinepaint, a fork of GIMP, can supposedly handle Canon RAW files, but I haven't tried it (I haven't gotten around to building it under Linux, and win32 support is minimal).
Kinda late... but here is where you can donate help this kind of thing.