OSI Announces Open Source Awards

JohnGrahamCumming writes "There's a story running on ZDNet about how OSI is going to be giving Open Source Awards with cash prizes of up to $10,000. The idea is to create the "Nobel Prizes" of Open Source. Announcement was made yesterday as OSCON with some big names backing the awards (e.g. Sun, OSAF and (interestingly) a major venture capital firm USVP)."

Flabbergasted!

$10,000! That's more cash than most OSS developers see in a full year! An Indian programming outfit could run off that kind of funding for years to come! Go ZDNet and Sun!

*ducks*

Re:Flabbergasted!

$10,000! ... An Indian programming outfit could run off that kind of funding for years to come!

That's the Grand Master award, you've gotta be RMS or someone to get that. Most of the awards are $500--you're going to have to find Bangladeshi programmers...

Holy Whackamolly! We've Got Chips!

$10,000?! WOW!

But really, if one was to write such a super OSS program, wouldn't he be hired by a big corporation and paid at least ten times that amount?

Hooray!

Pick me! Pick me! [sourceforge.net] Oh, wait a second... my project isn't popular and no one contributes to it.

Re:Hooray!

I wouldn't suggest they award the money to unpopular projects (mine are mostly that way too.. well people use em but seldom contribute) but I would suggest they exclude projects that have funding. I guess I'm suggesting they not give money towards Linux, Apache, PHP, MySQL, Gnome, KDE, Mozilla, OpenOffice, Perl, Python and various other tier one projects. Better to encourage people to write apps that are needed but not as popular. Spread the wealth a little.

So then

The Razzies for this will be called "The Pre-Alpha-Aplha Awards", given out to OSS projects that never make it out of "-1, thinking about it"

Sun

I thought we decided that Sun was evil this week. Did I miss a memo?

Awards....

What don't they give awards for nowadays?

This post, Winner, 2003
Best Slashdot Post
Best Use of Consonants in Slashdot Post
Louis K. Albright Award for Achievement in Punctuation

.

About time

It's about time someone does this. First off, open source developers deserve money for a good product (especially if it's comparable to a commercial product that there are paid programmers working on). Second, and perhaps more importantly, this can help attract higher quality programmers with more direction that will make higher quality products, and it can perhaps weed out some projects of promise that stagnate over time.

Go OSI.

This is great!

Perhaps this will cause even more people to start codeing!

coolio

This could entice Microsoft employees to leak windows code! At least in my world it could. You can't have mine! Get your own unicorns! Ack! Spiders!

Is it split?

Open source software is generally written by much more than one person. Would the winner have to split her winnings with hundreds of others, or would the award go to whoever led the project?

LETS LAY OFF MORE PEOPLE

By participating in stuff like this, all we are doing is getting more profits into the hands of big hardware and software integration companies, and getting more people laid off. The idea of Open Source is great for these companies because they dont have to pay for development costs, and they can make bigger profits that way. Who gets the shaft? software developers like you and me. Every body else is happy because they can get very cheap software on multiple patforms all they paid for a few core developers.

This OSS stuff has has done to software developers what MP3 has done to musicians. Eveybody is happy with the free stuff except the innovators who have to scrape by.

Dont fall into this trap, sponsered by greedy hardware companies that couldnt care less about paying for software.

OSI?

I mean the 7 layer stack is nice and all, but don't they know that TCP/IP is the standard these days?

Venture firm

Makes a lot of sense. Venture firms in general have been hurting lately thanks to the depressing influence of the-monopoly-who-shall-not-be-named. If a little seed money can help break things open, it could pay off handsomely. Of course, having first crack at people with serious ability is probaby worth the ante all by itself.

The Award Categories

The Open Source Awards categories include:

The Grand Master Award: This award will be given to persons with an outstanding record of contributions to the open-source and Internet cultures. Ideal candidates will have a record not only of technical excellence but of community leadership and service. Along with the recognition as Grand Master, the recipient will receive $10,000 and an invitation to serve as an elector on the collegium that issues the awards.

Merit Awards: These awards will be given four times per year for work on specific open-source or network-service projects. Recipients will be recognized at the annual event and will receive a cash award of $500.

The Special Award - These awards may occasionally be conferred at the Awards Committee's discretion as a way of recognizing praiseworthy projects or conduct not covered by the existing regular categories and experimenting with new categories. Recipients will be recognized at the annual event and will receive a cash award of $1500.

The Judges

Jeremy Allison, one of the lead developers on the Samba Team, a group of programmers developing an open source Windows(tm) compatible file and print server product for UNIX systems. Allison handles the release engineering and the co-ordination of Samba development efforts worldwide and acts as a corporate liaison to companies using the Samba code commercially.

Larry Augustin, a venture partner at Azure Capital Partners where he specializes in software, systems, and related IT infrastructure technologies. He currently serves on the boards of directors of VA Software Corporation (as chairman), the Open Source Development Lab, Linux International, and the Free Standards Group. Previously he was conference chairman for LinuxWorld Conference and Expo, and served on the conference advisory board. Augustin has appeared as a regular columnist in Linux Magazine, has written numerous articles, and is the author of "Hardware Design and Simulation in VAL/VHDL," published by Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Jim Gettys, a member of HP Labs' Cambridge Research Lab, currently working on making open source systems safe on handheld computers. He helped found the handhelds.org community. In 1984, Gettys started the X Window System that forms the base technology of the Linux and UNIX desktops, on which Gnome and KDE are based. Gettys worked at W3C on loan from Compaq Computer Corporation's Industry Standards and Consortia group from 1995-1999. He is the editor of the HTTP/1.1 specification (now an IETF Draft Standard).

Dr. Marshall Kirk McKusick, author, consultant, and professor on UNIX- and BSD-related subjects. While at the University of California at Berkeley, he implemented the 4.2BSD fast file system and was the research computer scientist at the Berkeley Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG), overseeing the development and release of 4.3BSD and 4.4BSD. He has been a strong advocate for the open-source movement since its inception in the mid 1980s.

Keith Packard, developer of open source software since 1986. Packard has focused on the X Window System since 1987, designing and executing large parts of the current implementation. He is currently employed by HP as a member of the Cambridge Research Laboratory working on pervasive and mobile computing. In 1999, he received a Usenix Lifetime Achievement award for his work on the X Window System.

Eric S. Raymond, observer-participant anthropologist in the Internet hacker culture. His research has helped explain the decentralized open-source model of software development that has proven so effective in the evolution of the Internet. His own software projects include one of the Internet's most widely-used email transport programs. Raymond is the co-founder of the Open Source Awards.

Guido van Rossum, creator of Python, one of the major free scripting languages. He created Python in the early 1990s at the National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science in the Netherlands, and is still actively involved in the development of the language. van Rossum recently accepted a position at Elemental Security, a start-up founded by Dan Farmer.

From the awards ceremony ...

<flamebait>

The nominees in the category of Longest Lived Project to Never Release 1.0 are -

• Enlightenment
• the HURD
• JDOM

And the winner is ... the HURD! (Cue music as RMS goes up to the stage).

</flamebait>

Is there a FUD award?

Cus we all know who would win it :)

Except that ...

OSI is going to be giving Open Source Awards with cash prizes of up to $10,000. The idea is to create the "Nobel Prizes" of Open Source.

... a Nobel Prize amounts to 10M SEK (125 K$) [nobel.se]. Mind the units !

ideology

An award often also communicates some kind of an ideological thingy. It would be interesting to see what would happen in terms of community reactions when OSI awards an OSS project that isn't Free Software.

USVP is a smart outfit

Look at their successes here [usvp.com].

They know that companies can make great produucts and a lot of money using open source tools. Plus, if they get the companies they invest in to use said tools, they can use their capital on more important things, like Aeron chairs... oops wrong decade!

Dammit we can do this...

Just put a paypal or amazon or some other payment link on your page OR your special address to get mail from the internet jungle.

For groups you'll have to figure out how to divide the money, just give me a place to send the dough.

I donate all the time, it's small sure but I do.

In the past few months I've donated about 110 dollars. I donate to ANYTHING that gives me value and that has a way for me to do so.

I like doing it.

Trust the committee to be impartial?

Anyone noticed that the 7 person committee includes Dr. Marshall Kirk McKusick (4.2BSD fast filesystem), Eric S. Raymond (loves python), Guido van Rossum (python creator)?

Wonder how that would affect projects that rival those people's projects to get awards? Say, Hans Reiser (reiserfs), or anything related to Perl?

ActiveState Awards

There's a similar Open Source award (although no fat sacks of cash included). Just a few days ago the ActiveState Active Awards [activestate.com] were handed out at OSCON [oreillynet.com]. These awards are given to those actively contributing in the Open Source world.

Re:This could be what we need to be ready for desk

I've seen that GNOME file dialog before.

Windows 3.1. Yeah. It was teh suxor there too.

KDE though ripped off Win98...

Gotta stop cloning Big Evil, guys!!

-uso.

Horrible

That's one of the worst posts I've ever seen on Slashdot [slashdot.org].

Re:/. is a significant contribution to open source

That's a good point and there's nothing in the Open Source Awards that says that /. couldn't get an award. In fact the Special Awards (Silver) are designed for whatever purpose the electors want. So they could give an award to /. or some other entity that has helped a lot. It's really a catch all.

John.

Re:Just hold on a minute

Just working on an OSS project is a "Survivor-type contest" because you are constantly battling for your own survival.

John.

Re:My VOTE is for the ReactOS Project

We are going to open up a nominations mailing list through the OSI web site that I'll be moderating and will look for nominations like this.

Thanks,
John.

Re:and the winner is!!!!

How many Open Source project do *real* SQA work? How many do code reviews *before* commit? How many have comprehensive unit tests in place? How many have an accurate and correct set of design documents? Heck, how many put down more than two sentences of design before they start coding?

Re:Open Source: serious problem here

I'm not sure why copying files would take that long--especially hard drive to hard drive. I know that Linux isn't so good when it comes to accessing mounted drives like CD-ROMs and floppy (floppy support is horrible in Linux right now). But hard drive should be ok. Maybe there is something wrong with your hard drive, or something is misconfigured.

As far as stability is concerned, Linux (the operating system) is very stable. You rarely ever have to reboot if something crashes or if you change your settings. However, the desktop applications aren't so great yet. Mozilla seems to be slow and I have had some apps crash (even the excellent GIMP)

System requirements for Windows and Linux are pretty much identical (unless you are running a barebones server or some specialized box, in which case Linux is better). I have dual-boot Win98SE/Win2000 and Mandrake 9.1 on a PIII-450 with 384MB RAM and performance is similar between all of them. Linux takes longer to boot up but other than that, it is just as fast.

So far there are two main advantages of Linux: (i) stability (especially if you try running servers), (ii) free or low-cost applications. Regardless of how you look at it, Linux is far more attractive for home users and small/medium businesses. Both of these segments don't have a lot of money to spend and GNU/Linux offers them a lot of applications. For instance, buying Mandrake or Red Hat or SuSE for $100 will basically give you an OS+office suite+image editors+internet tools. On the Windows side, you would have to purchase many individual components. In Linux, if you want to create a graphic for your website, you can use GIMP. If you wnat ot upload the files, just use the free FTP GUI program--Windows doesn't have one. And so on.

The way I see it... those that are cost-conscious (basically lower-middle class and lower) will likely go with Linux in the future. While those that don't care about money, will probably stick with Windows.

KoalaBear33

Re:Open Source? More like Openly Racist

Only read the first bit... completely useless post but hey, I'm unemployed and have no life :(

Alan Cox; Richard Stallman; Bruce Perens; Wichert Akkerman; Miguel DeIcaza. What do you see in this list of names? Are there any African-Americans on it? Absolutely not, none of those names sound like one a self-respecting black person would have!

How can you really guess whether a person is black based on their names? If you are talking about Africa or something, I can see what you mean. But nearly all African Americans have European names.

KoalaBear33

Re:Open Source: serious problem here

I guess it just depends what you use the system for. I build web sites at work on a W2K system and at home on a Linux system. The work box specs at three times the speed of my home system. There is no question that I'm more productive on my home system. Regarding your hd to hd file transfer problem, that's not standard. Something's broke on that machine.

Re:Open Source: serious problem here

(Am I feeding a troll here? *shrugs*)

Firstly your copying problem:
Check that your hdd has all the necessary DMA etc. flags on for performance. Use hdparm if necessary. What filesystems are you using? How full is the disk? I know that windows will start choking with fragmentation on FAT32 and NTFS volumes with anything less than 500MB free (with or without a pagefile).
Yes, these are problems that are usually transparent in Windows, but if you're going to run linux (for whatever perceived benefit this may give) then you have to be prepared to invest some time in keeping it running smoothly.

> why anyone would choose to use an Open Source over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.

I use linux mainly for development: XEmacs, gcc, gdb. Of course I browse (mozilla), play some music (xmms), and chat a little (irssi) while I'm at it. Ocassionally I might need to do some word processing (Abiword). Performance is fine for me.
So:

• There's no impeding performance difference for what I use it for.
• Downloading and burning a copy of Debian is most definitely cheaper (financially) than buying a copy of XP Pro
• I haven't had the kernel crash while I'm working, which is more than I can say for kernel stops in XP.

Even when I'm in Windows I usually have a number of rxvt consoles open, running under Cygwin (yes, open source).

So, to answer your challenge, if some how I could find a faster, cheaper, more stable system that wasn't open source then I guess I'd be compelled to consider it, but right now none really come to mind - although, I am seduced by OS X ;)