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."

Comments

See!!!

[TopShelf]

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

Re:See!!!

[Short Circuit]

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.

Re:See!!!

[nkh]

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

Re:See!!!

[bigdavex]

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

All they need now is another $199.

awards 4 times a year

[millahtime]

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.

Re:awards 4 times a year

[JohnGrahamCumming]

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.

Re:awards 4 times a year

[Short Circuit]

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.

Re:awards 4 times a year

[adam mcmaster]

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.

Re:awards 4 times a year

[Lurker McLurker]

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.

Speech...

[bennomatic]

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!

Some worthy projects in my opinion

[baywulf]

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.

Pearpc for Q3

[MrRuslan]

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.

GIMP is all you need.

[Futurepower(R)]

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.

$500!

[lawngnome]

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 !

Comma delimited lists

[selan]

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.

Bigger! More!

[stomv]

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"

Glad to see Tom Lord get the nod

[Tet]

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.