[Offtopic] 'Open Source Oscars'

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

SourceForge Unveils Winners of 'Open-Source Oscars' 

File archiver 7-Zip wins award as all-over best project; Firebird 
relational database is voted best project for the enterprise 

By China Martens, IDG News Service July 27, 2007 
<http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/07/27/SourceForge-unveils-open-source-
winners_1.html?source=NLC-TB&cgd=2007-07-27>

Popular open-source software development site SourceForge.net hosted the 
equivalent of the open-source Oscars on Thursday evening, billing the 
event as a big party, not a painfully long and formal awards ceremony. 

File archiver 7-Zip won the top award as all-over best project, and also 
picked up the prize for best technical design. 

The Firebird relational database was another double winner, being voted 
both best project for the enterprise, and the project providing the best 
user support. 

It was the second time SourceForge.net has asked its community to vote for 
their favorite open-source projects after debuting its Community Choice 
Awards last year. 

The awards are one way SourceForge.net has discovered to highlight strong 
and popular performers among the more than 150,000 open-source projects 
the site hosts, according to Ross Turk, SourceForge.net's community 
manager. "Last year, there was a really good response," he said. "I think 
people really value being a winner." 

SourceForge.net has around 1.6 million registered users, around 80 percent 
of whom are based outside of the U.S. 

The community first nominated 10 finalists for each of the 11 awards and 
then voted for the winner in each category.

One surprise for the organizers was eMule, a peer-to-peer file sharing 
client, winning as best new project, since the project was first published 
on SourceForge.net in 2002. 

Because of that, Turk said, they decided to have two winners of the best 
new project award, also recognizing runner-up Launchy, an application 
launcher for Windows and a more recent project on SourceForge.net. 

The other SourceForge.net 2007 Community Choice Award winners were:

* Audacity as best project for multimedia

* Azureus as most collaborative project

* phpBB as best project for communications

* phpMyAdmin as best tool or utility for system administrators;

* ScummVM as best project for gamers;

* TortoiseSVN for best tool or utility for developers.

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Cheers, people
Stephen Loosley
Victoria, Australia