Call For Open Source Awards 2008 Nominations

chromatic writes "Google and O'Reilly have published the Call For Open Source Awards 2008 Nominations. These awards, given at OSCON 2008, recognize individual contributors who have demonstrated exceptional leadership, creativity, and collaboration in the development of open source software. The nomination process is open to the entire open source community, and nominations close on May 15. Here's your chance to sing the praises of previously unsung hackers."

Comments

Requested Category

[eldavojohn]

They're missing a category for the "It's a Trap! Award" as I would like to nominate The Prince of Darkness for his work with OOXML 'community acceptance.'

Balmer and Gates

[MosesJones]

I nominate Steve Balmer and Bill Gates, in the last month they have done more to promote the concept of alternative operating systems than anyone else in the market. Bill by saying the next Windows is out next year and Steve by saying that Vista is a work in progress. Without the sterling work of these two men in hampering Microsoft it would be much harder for Open Source software in the corporate world.

No discussion...

[mebrahim]

I vote for Vista.

Re:No discussion...

[JohnBailey]

I vote WGA. The process that gave me the final push to move to Linux.

Mark Shuttleworth

[k33l0r]

I nominate Mark Shuttleworth of Ubuntu fame. Ubuntu has done more to promote a desktop Linux than any other distro before.

Re:Mark Shuttleworth

[Enderandrew]

I'm all about Gentoo myself, but my wife decided to give Linux a go so we tried several distros. We tried Kubuntu on her laptop with 7.10 I believe.

Out of the box there were no codecs and all that, which I wasn't shocked by, but I was routinely assaulted on the forums and chat room for even asking about them. How dare you install non-free software! Convert your 20 gig library of mp3's to ogg!

She had an ATI Card in her laptop, and I wanted to show her compiz. There isn't a free driver that provides 3D acceleration for her card. The instructions I found via Google said to use a restricted modules manager that didn't exist. I found later you can install it seperately, but that module doesn't ship with the distro. Again, I was routinely assaulted for even asking how to install the ATI driver. The traditional install methods work on every other distro, but fail on *buntu. I got it working after pulling out much hair.

Next, several software programs that shipped by default with the distro were just broken. Kicker and Konqui crashed all the time. I submitted bug reports and was informed I either didn't know how to use the apps (clearly, I don't know how to use kicker, though I have zero issues with in on Gentoo) or that my problem was using a x86_64 build which weren't "officially" supported, despite the fact that they are official releases, and you can get LTS support for x86_64 releases. I wonder what Mark would say about his mods saying x86_64 isn't official.

To boot, we never got wireless working on her laptop, not once. I wanted to install madwifi, and try a different kernel. I downloaded the mm source, but there were no build tools. I was searching for the right packages, and again was assualted for asking. "You should never attempt to compile anything! That is only for devs! Never touch the kernel! What are you thinking!" There was no nice meta-package I found that pulled in a complete toolchain. But I got all the packages I needed eventually. But when I booted my -mm kernel, it wouldn't load synaptics, ati driver, etc. because I lacked a restricted modules package specific for my kernel uname. I googled and asked repeatedly, and no one would help with how to produce this package myself.

I installed Suse, and wireless worked out of the box. I tried a few distros, and my wife eventually settled on Sabayon, where everything worked out of the box.

However, not only did Kubuntu have horrible packages that were broken, it had by far the worse default KDE desktop I saw. It also lacked the standard features that Mark was currently pimping for the Ubuntu release, because they are quite slow trying to work those features in Kubuntu.

Fedora, Suse and all the other big boys have custom theming for both their Gnome and KDE desktops. Suse has been providing some great patches, backporting stuff from KDE 4.1 trunk, etc.

Ubuntu says, this is what you're getting. Don't think about installing anything non-free, don't mess with packages, don't touch the kernel, live with the default, and like it!

I actually had a mod suggest to me that I should divorce my wife because she bought a laptop that wasn't 100% supported by free drivers. That's a great community.

However, if you'd like I can really go into some lengthy rants about 1,000 things wrong with Ubuntu.

Nominations

[Enderandrew]

Best Kernel Hacker - Andrew Morton (-mm kernel line)
Best Project Leader - Aaron Sergio (KDE 4)

What might be more fun

[niceone]

What might be more fun would be one for the worst OSS developers - there could be categories for least notice taken of user requirements, best flaming of dumb newbie questions on the support forums, most hostile to new developers joining the team...

I'm too polite to nominate anyone though.