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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."
Well, I imagine it serves as a sort of continuous "Who's hot, and who's not" announcement.
People will probably send these maintainers the email equivalent of a slap on the back, and thumbs up.
Also, it draws attention to the developers. Some of these guys might end up hired as a result of these announcements. Tom Lord especially, since two of his projects won.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Given the rapid development cycles of some projects, I don't think four times a year is too much. If they were anual many important projects could be missed.
At risk of being redundant, $500 isn't a whole lot for all the time these guys put into their projects.
On the other hand, the recognition may land them jobs as developers or as managers of a group of developers.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
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.
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.
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.
Hear hear! There are so many great programs that are really just front-ends for some service, and yet aren't implemented as such. A classic example is netpbm, a great set of image manipulation programs to crop, rotate, convert formats etc - just the kind of operations that would be perfect in a general-purpose image manipulation library. But alas, all the logic is bound up in the program.
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.