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Second quarter Open Source Awards announced

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the cough-up-some-cash dept.

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."

27 of 106 comments (clear)

  1. See!!! by TopShelf · · Score: 4, Funny

    And who said Open Source can't be financially rewarding...

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    Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
    1. Re:See!!! by Short+Circuit · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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)
    2. Re:See!!! by nkh · · Score: 5, Funny

      All these guys are now wondering how much ramen one can buy with $500!

    3. Re:See!!! by bigdavex · · Score: 4, Funny

      And who said Open Source can't be financially rewarding...

      All they need now is another $199.

      --
      -Dave
  2. awards 4 times a year by millahtime · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?
    1. Re:awards 4 times a year by JohnGrahamCumming · · Score: 5, Informative

      You can read the full details here but Merit Awards are given out four times a year, and Special and Grand Master awards once per year.

      John.

    2. Re:awards 4 times a year by Short+Circuit · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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)
    3. Re:awards 4 times a year by adam+mcmaster · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re:awards 4 times a year by Lurker+McLurker · · Score: 3, Informative
      There are different types of awards. Merit awards are quarterly, Special and Grand Master awards are handed out annually. The Grand Master award gives you $10,000.

      See the Open Source Awards Charter for more details.

      --
      Mod parent up!
  3. Wide open by wombatmobile · · Score: 2, Funny

    "OSI is currently looking for nominations for the Q3 awards to be announced at OSCON."

    I nominate these (wide) open sourcers from Washington state.
  4. Speech... by bennomatic · · Score: 4, Funny

    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?
  5. Some worthy projects in my opinion by baywulf · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Some worthy projects in my opinion by JohnGrahamCumming · · Score: 2, Informative

      Yeah, but if you'd actually like these projects to be considered for an award you need to nominate them, rather than posting in a /. comment.

      It's not hard, all it takes is sending an email!

      John.

    2. Re:Some worthy projects in my opinion by pr0nbot · · Score: 2, Insightful
      Both would be awesome if converted into libraries used by other programs.


      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.

  6. No award for Eric Raymond? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  7. Pearpc for Q3 by MrRuslan · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  8. GIMP is all you need. by Futurepower(R) · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:GIMP is all you need. by bogie · · Score: 2

      How true. If you just want to do things like crop images, change light levels, adjust saturation etc there is no reason not to use Gimp. For what most digital shutterbugs do GIMP works quite well and it has the added bonus of being a program you can grow into. The sad thing is now that we have mentioned The Gimp, 100 Photoshop fanboys will magically show up and tell us how Gimp sucks and Photoshop rules...Sigh.

      --
      If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
  9. CoLinux by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  10. I don't know this as fact, but... by IANAAC · · Score: 2, Insightful
    because I haven't read much on the page, but...

    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.

    1. Re:I don't know this as fact, but... by 14erCleaner · · Score: 2, Interesting
      It would seem to me that the awards go to people/teams that have created great Open Source software, not evangelists.

      Arguably the award for Gnu Arch was made to evangelists. They even go out of their way on their opening page (http://www.gnu.org/software/gnu-arch) to slam those who aren't true enough in their beliefs:

      It is somewhat well known, these days, that some of the core developers of the Linux kernel are using a revision control system which is not free software. There is a need to create a free software alternative to that system and to do so is one of the goals of the arch project

      --
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  11. $500! by lawngnome · · Score: 3, Funny

    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 !

  12. Comma delimited lists by selan · · Score: 3, Informative
    That sentence should read:
    Three people/projects got $500 Merit Awards: Martin Pool for distcc, Tom Lord for GNU Arch, and The GIMP.
    Yet another example of why it's a good idea to use a comma before the last item in a list. The last two awards went to the GIMP project and to Tom Lord for his work on GNU Arch.
  13. Bigger! More! by stomv · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
  14. Glad to see Tom Lord get the nod by Tet · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:Glad to see Tom Lord get the nod by listen · · Score: 2, Informative

      I thought monotone, codeville, and darcs all used the distributed repository model as well as arch & bk. They may be a little further behind in terms of features or surrounding tools, but each one does have some interesting theory/philosophy of version control behind it.

      And darcs is written in haskell, so it wins points for enjoying the soundness and showing once again that pure FP can be and is used in the "real world"...

      I wouldn't discount any of them yet, but I agree that the subversion fanboys are pretty damn irritating, trying to get every project to switch away from CVS now, when it would clearly be better to wait and see how some of the more revolutionary free systems evolve.

      However, anything is better than clearcase...

  15. My favorite open sourced beverage by Psymunn · · Score: 2, Funny

    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