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Linux Software

CNET to Award Open Source Initiatives 75

Posted by Zonk from the hats-off dept.
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."
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CNET to Award Open Source Initiatives More

CNET to Award Open Source Initiatives

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  • Cute award (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 04, 2005 @03:37PM (#12724899)
    Of course in the closed source world, the "prize" for success is cold hard cash.

  • Yipe (Score:5, Funny)

    by rbochan ( 827946 ) on Saturday June 04, 2005 @03:37PM (#12724900) Homepage
    And we all know what a bastion of OSS CNET/ZDNet is...
    • More like a bastion of Linux vs Windows trolling. Esp. the ZDnet side.

      Now add IE vs Firefox trolling to the list.

      They gotta get page hits somehow...

    • That is more insightful than funny.

      It's almost like a me-too reaction. Looks like everybody is into Open Source, so let me also play the game and hopefully see how I can make it work for me.

      Besides, any publicity is good publicity right?

      If they went ahead and bashed OSS, folks would be up in arms. Now if they did something like this and bashed Open Source, folks would be confused, and some may even take them serious.

      Ooh, the conundrum.

  • Article Text (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Open Source Initiative of the Year Category

    Open source is becoming an increasingly important and accepted part of the enterprise technology landscape and, in many organisations, it is progressing from the edge-of-network servers into mission critical jobs in the datacentre and onto the desktop. This award aims to recognise the company, individual or group of individuals that has helped make this happen.

    You may have developed an application, or equally have lobbied for an important issue to help push
  • All I can think of is the timeless Graucho Marx line 'I wouldn't be a member of any country club that would have me as a member'.

  • Gosh... who could be the winner? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Could it be Firefox and the Mozilla Foundation by chance? Sources say... yes.

  • CNET?? (Score:5, Funny)

    by SleepyHappyDoc ( 813919 ) on Saturday June 04, 2005 @03:39PM (#12724913)
    What on Earth makes them think they are qualified to select the best Open Source Initiative of the year? Don't they own download.com, arguably the largest repository of crap-filled closed-source downloadables? This sounds like the Winston-Salem Environmental & Health awards...
  • This would be a neat slashdot poll, but I think firefox is the clear winnner this year.

    ~Rebecca
  • from the rules:

    The Awards are open to all companies that have been trading in the UK for at least 12 months prior to the Awards deadline. In certain cases, companies that are nominated by third parties will be considered for the awards.
    • 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 t

  • The Park Lane Hilton is a very ordinary hotel. Anybody who describes it as swanky needs to get out more. Mind you, they used to do a good afternoon tea. Back in the 70s....
    Now Browns is a swanky hotel. And the Savoy was, once, before it was taken over. But, and I'm sorry to destroy anybody's fantasies, the London Hilton is about as swanky as Paris Hilton, and for much the same reason.
    • Know what you mean, but you could put it into perspective by visiting the Milton Keynes Hilton! After that shock you'll see why Park Lane is their 'flagship'...
  • is good publicity. I for one am not going to complain about some postive mainstream attention.

  • Supporting... anonymously (Score:5, Funny)

    by sjbe ( 173966 ) on Saturday June 04, 2005 @03:52PM (#12724977)
    An anonymous reader writes ... good to see such explicit acknowledging of the work being done by the open source community.

    Good to see people willing to stand up and openly support open source...

  • Useless (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jd ( 1658 ) <(imipak) (at) (yahoo.com)> on Saturday June 04, 2005 @04:03PM (#12725024) Homepage Journal
    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.

    • Let's face it, the award is a meaningless token from cnet to the open source community in hopes that we'll stop disliking them, mosey over to download.com, and click on one or maybe even two of their banner ads.

      It costs them absolutely nothing to pick some random project and give it a $13 plastic trophy. Some assistant will probably pick the first piece of open source software that pops into his head and write a quick suckup speech which boils down to:

      blah blah blah... changing the world for the bette

    • Porting JFS to Linux had zero commercial potential in itself, but has not only made IBM a recognized name,

      This is where I stopped reading. /. is a riot! :)

      • Re:Useless (Score:2)

        by jd ( 1658 )
        For a long time, IBM's name almost ceased to exist outside of the mainframe sector. OS/2 was a flop, the PS/2 a disaster, even the standard IBM PCs were expensive and slow. They lost something like 15 billion in one quarter, I seem to remember.

        When an explorer "discovers" a village in the Amazon, clearly the inhabitants were perfectly well aware that it existed, but it still counts as a discovery.

        In this case, IBM had largely vanished into the mainframe market, contracted violently after some crippling

  • It's clear that Open Source is becoming more mainstream by the day. I think there has to be some admission that the coined term of OpenSource does beat out "free software" from a marketing and appeal to general public.

    Good job!

    • That would be because they're two different things. Open Source isn't the same as Free software, regardless of where you're standing.
      • It might help to keep in mind that Open Source began as a marketing campaign for Free Software. The point was to foster use by business by creating a more distinguishing name than "Free Software", which most people misinterpret as meaning low-quality shareware/adware/freeware.

        It looks like the GP was pointing out that even "Open Source" and the OSI have seen their share of controversy, the name been very successful at getting Free Software to be used by both business and regular people.

        It's a similar con
  • a nice hotel seems far too corporate for anything relating to open source. Surely this goes against what the open source software community really stands for.
    For open source award to have any real merit it would have to be run by the community somehow, and voted for by people in the community who have their finger on the pulse of what's going on and who's doing great things.

    Having said that, the attention it may bring could help to push open-source software (eg firefox).into the home of the average person.

  • Who died and made CNET... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by krbvroc1 ( 725200 ) on Saturday June 04, 2005 @04:15PM (#12725069)
    I'm sorry, but what qualification does CNET have to bestow open source software awards? I imagine this is just a way to put OSS marketing hype on closed source products so the lastest version of MS Office (because it uses XML) can put a CNET OSS Most Innovative Award 2006.

    This would be like Microsoft awarding a Freedom to Innovate award each year.

  • proprietary entry form (Score:4, Insightful)

    by AndreyFilippov ( 550131 ) on Saturday June 04, 2005 @04:30PM (#12725159) Homepage
    To submit an entry for the "Open Source Initiative of the Year" you have to fill out MS word (entry_form_2005.doc) file.
  • I can see it now, the F/OSSey awards, sponsored by Cheetos and Jolt cola.... Broadcast live on public access television and bittorrent (of course) with a counter in the lower right corner that counts the number of not-paid-for downloads since the broadcast started..... Hooray
  • I'd recommend gcc be entered in, seeing how much software wouldn't be here today without it. Sadly, it'll be the Han Solo award all over again.
  • That the entry form is in MS Office DOC format :-(

    Come on guys, how about PDF or plain HTML.

  • Man, what an incredible application from the open source community. Plus it turns an evil little box in the living room into the home media center that every electronics company has been chasing for what, 10 years now?

    Check it out. [xboxmediacenter.com] I'm not on the team, I've got no vested interest in promoting it, I just think it's one of the coolest OSS things I've seen in ages.

  • Jeez... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by chrisd ( 1457 ) * <chrisd@dibona.com> on Sunday June 05, 2005 @01:09AM (#12727409) Homepage
    And they have no sponsors and no judges. Good luck on this one CNet, did you really mean to launch this now? This smells like a premature launch to me. My advice: Pull the page and relaunch when you have the lists populated.

    I've been down this road before, it ain't pretty.

    Chris

  • You may still nominate Free Software projects for the TuxMobil GNU/Linux Award 2005 [tuxmobil.org].

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