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Call For Open Source Awards 2008 Nominations
Posted by
kdawson
on Sat Apr 26, 2008 01:00 PM
from the singing-the-unsung dept.
from the singing-the-unsung dept.
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."
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Ask Slashdot: Nominations Open For "Most Likely to be Shut Down By Government" 629 comments
The corporate overlords at SourceForge asked me to name a Slashdot category for their upcoming
Community Choice Awards and to let you guys select the winner. I have named my category "Most Likely to be Shut Down by a Government Agency." We're going to run this like we do an Ask Slashdot call for questions — post your nominations into the comments here. Use moderation to send up good ideas. In the upcoming days we'll post another story where you can vote on the actual winner. Nominations need to include the project name, a link to some sort of official website, and a paragraph of why you think they deserve to win. The project that wins will gain fame, notoriety, and maybe a cease and desist order that they could print out and frame if they had that kind of time.
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Re: (Score:2, Funny)
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(farewell, sweet karma)
Requested Category (Score:5, Funny)
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Balmer and Gates (Score:5, Interesting)
No discussion... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No discussion... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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It didn't bring me to linux, but it did kill my dual booting days.
Mark Shuttleworth (Score:4, Insightful)
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I loathe Ubuntu, and most everything about it. However, he does a good job promoting his product, even if the product itself isn't very good.
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Re:Mark Shuttleworth (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Do not offend (Score:1, Funny)
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Almost everything in my post is easily verifiable.
For the record, I don't take kindly to being called a liar by someone who is not only full of shit themselves, but also unwilling to post under their own name.
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Apart from trying kde4 when it was experimental ive never come across a broken package
Installing mp3 support was simply sudo apt-get install kubuntu-restricted-something, which google answered didnt even have to ask.
Restricted-manager-kde also solved all my wifi/ati problems without a problem. I then went on to google and install the latest ATI drivers without any problems
The comunity are usually quite helpful, ofc there's always somebody
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I said, "well, I try to buy hardware with Linux in mind, but my wife bought this laptop before she decided to switch to Linux."
He told me I was stupid for marrying her if she didn't know what to buy, and that I should divorce her.
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I'm going to log into the Ubuntu and Kubuntu forums and see what I can find from messages posted publicly, but I ran into crap in the irc channels, and both forums repeatedly. I reported one post for flaming, and that is when a mod started ripping into me repeatedly through a PM.
I'm the only enderandrew on the internet, and any Google search will show the countless forums I'm registered on. I never run into problems with moderators. I'm not full of shit, and I
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firefox & compiz
mark, may have made a great distro that got alot of limelight, but the fast is that he just happens to have jumped on board at a very good time, ubuntu has done very little that isnt just tying loose ends together, very little high quality coding.
Ubuntu may be many things but it has not "demonstrated exceptional creativity, and collaboration in the development of open sourc
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...ubuntu has done very little that isnt just tying loose ends together, very little high quality coding.
And that's precisely the stuff that most coders don't bother to finish off. A lot of open-source projects are written to scratch an itch and when that 'itch' is scratched sufficiently the coder generally stops. The trouble is, the point where the itch stops and the point where software is usable to a more widespread audience (beyond people who live/work with similar stuff) is usually not the same. So if all that Ubuntu does is add a bit of spit/polish to bring it up to shine then that's still worth h
Nominations (Score:4, Interesting)
Best Project Leader - Aaron Sergio (KDE 4)
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Did it load? Was it horribly broken?
Most of the core stuff was there and working fairly well for such a large refactoring. Obviously, tons of bugs have been squashed since the 4.0 release, but any major release of that magnitude will have some bugs, unless you are Google and just leave something in beta for years and years.
Then you're just in semantics on what you call a release.
How
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Then you're just in semantics on what you call a release.
I'm stuck on semantics on what a release should be called? The various explanations offered by the KDE developers after the fact was pure marketing drivel ("KDE 4.0 is not KDE4" for example). What they released in January I'd be doing a favor by calling a developer release.
How many lives of code are in the KDE SVN? He designed the concept of Plasma, designed a complete refactoring, did a bunch of coding himself, did a bunch of PR, changed the build system, and largely rebuilt KDE from the ground up. That is no small task given the time frame. The fact that there is a very stable KDE 4 desktop literally a few months after the 4.0 release said they got it mostly right. To top it all off, at the same time he was also developing Mac OS X and Windows ports from the ground up as well.
Perhaps there was too much on his plate. At the very least he should have cut back on some of the PR and hype leading up to the release.
Name one other project of that magnitude that pulled off a release like that this year. I'd say that qualifies him for best project manager of the year.
KDE4 is indeed an impressive project. But it may have been better received, and more ea
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Then you're just in semantics on what you call a release
I'm quoting you, quoting me and all, but I wasn't assaulting you specifically. In context, I was saying if you call something a beta for years, rather than ever have a release, then that is just semantics. Google updates their code and services all the time. People keep suggesting that KDE should have called 4.0 something other than a release, but again, it is just semantics.
Aaron was quite clear, repeatedly on what the release was and wasn't.
And saying that 4.0 doesn't fully represent everything that 4
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People keep suggesting that KDE should have called 4.0 something other than a release, but again, it is just semantics.
It's just semantics until a school or business that isn't privy to the KDE team's reshuffling of release definitions tries to install what is called a final release and discovers that it is still not feature complete and has lots of bugs.
And saying that 4.0 doesn't fully represent everything that 4 will be isn't drivel. Apparently you didn't use KDE 3.0 or KDE 2.0
Huh. Seem a tad strange then that there was controversy about KDE4's release, since everyone apparently is on the same page as to what constitutes a .0 final release. I suppose every "final" release is really only intended for early adopters or as a sort of technology p
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The KDE 4 website says quite clearly that it hasn't reached full feature parity and isn't ready for everyday use for everyone.
I'm not sure what isn't clear about that.
And who said the release was final? They are releasing new versions every three weeks right now. Seems far from final.
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The KDE 4 website says quite clearly that it hasn't reached full feature parity and isn't ready for everyday use for everyone.
Where? http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.0/ [kde.org]
From that page: "KDE 4.0 is the innovative Free Software desktop containing lots of applications for every day use as well as for specific purposes."
And who said the release was final? They are releasing new versions every three weeks right now. Seems far from final.
Well, by that definition, a software release is never final.
Also from the release page: "The KDE Community is thrilled to announce the immediate availability of KDE 4.0. This significant release marks both the end of the long and intensive development cycle leading up to KDE 4.0 and the beginning of the KDE 4
What might be more fun (Score:5, Funny)
I'm too polite to nominate anyone though.
I would like to nominate Freenet (Score:1, Funny)
Eric S. Raymond (Score:1)
I nominated Eric S. Raymond for his outreach and community efforts in making open source a well-defined, understood, and established. ESR has been a prominent voice and force in the open source movement, he co-founded the Open Source Initiative, helped with the release of the Mozilla code as open source, and continues to contribute to various open source projects directly including X11, Battle for Wesnoth, Emacs, Fetchmail, Freeciv,
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As far as his personality, let the geek/nerd/hacker with the super pleasant personality cast the first stone.
I admire him and his work a great deal, and find that it speaks for itself.
Moe
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That'd be ironic; ESR's one of the people who organized the previous incarnation of the Open Source Awards, of which I understand some recipients never in fact received their promised awards.
I vote for the creators and maintainers of rsync (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Apple may have gotten more popular because of Vista, but I've not seen any figures to suggest OSS is making any dents in the Windows market.
Not reading your messages? (Score:3, Interesting)
If you have read your messages I know you've seen these figures:
Windows sinks 24% [bloomberg.com]
Keep twisting those numbers (Score:2)
Mac sales are up true, in the US mainly [nytimes.com] and this has slightly dented Vista sales.
Now, i'm not going to be disingenuous here; the OLPC and the eePC are doing well; almost in their own category, but even they run Windows now.
And what of the server end? Well, Windows seems to be gaining there too [eweek.com]; let's be honest, if there's one area Windows could do better in, it's t
I'm really enjoying this. (Score:1)
Cute. You got Walmart to stop selling linux in stores. Nobody cares. Walmart.com is open 24/7 and they offer three different kinds of Linux on 24 different platforms. Wanna try again?
Up 50% quarter over year ago, if you don't mind, and it hasn't slightly dented Vista sales. Vis
There's lies, damned lies..... (Score:2)
I expect we could keep throwing links and at each other all week long, so i'll cut this one short...see my last statement above from my previous comment.
Until then, I'm sure someone here will listen to your rantings.
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nonsense (Score:2, Informative)
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