CNET to Award Open Source Initiatives

An anonymous reader writes "CNET's 2005 awards will for the first time include a category for Open Source Initiative of the Year. The winner will be announced at a gala dinner in London's swanky Park Lane Hilton in September. It's good to see such explicit acknowledging of the work being done by the open source community."

Comments

Cute award

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course in the closed source world, the "prize" for success is cold hard cash.

Useless

[jd]

The criteria used are, well, useless. "Commercial potential"? How are you going to establish that? Porting JFS to Linux had zero commercial potential in itself, but has not only made IBM a recognized name (which has resulted in commercial potential in itself) but has likely helped make their mainframes that ship with Linux more compatiable with existing IBM systems (which also has commercial potential).

Lustre, a great Linux network filing system, is selling for quite extraordinary sums of money - which means it undoubtably has commercial value and interest. The mailing list is fairly active and they are even organizing international meetings to cover it. Not bad for a project that is GPLed and is sufficiently far off the mainstream as to be considered esoteric outside the clustering world.

However, that is exactly the point. Lustre IS esoteric, in many ways, and IS only really appealing to special interest groups, but is also unquestionably innovative and a commercial success. How on earth can you make a meaningful comparison of that with, say, Firefox that has zero commercial value, uses a lot of recycled components, but has triggered a massive level of awareness in both Open Source and software security?

The two are both extremely significant, but significant in vastly different ways, and both are different again from the impact of porting JFS and XFS, which have both revolutionized the way IBM and SGI look at the hardware and software markets.

So you have lots of different categories. But will those categories be meaningful? "Best new product" is a likely category, but is hardly informative and tells you nothing about how you would compare the vast range of different products that exist.

On the other hand, if you split things up by what they do, you'd almost end up with one category per product, so everyone would end up winning on something, making an award a meaningless achievement.

proprietary entry form

[AndreyFilippov]

To submit an entry for the "Open Source Initiative of the Year" you have to fill out MS word (entry_form_2005.doc) file.

Re:Important to note

[NickFortune]

The Awards are open to all companies that have been trading in the UK for at least 12 months prior to the Awards deadline.

So they may be giving money to open source, but none of that nsaty 'orrible community maintained nonsense.

mmm...

I wonder if the judges will deem participants in MS' shared source initiative as eligble to enter. More to the point, will projects whose only "openness" derives from signing a Microsoft NDA be considered eligible?

Suppose one of MS shared source projects were to win this award, in the apparent, if illusory, face of such projects as Firefox and Apache. In some circles that might seem to add much needed credibility to the "shared source". I wonder how much that would be worth to Redmond?

Purely speculation, of course.