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Comdex Announcements Linux Business

Winners of O'Reilly's COMDEX Contest Anounced 134

Posted by Cliff from the congratulations dept.
Alexander Limi writes: "The winners of the O'Reilly "Open Source Goes to COMDEX" Contest have been announced. The lucky ones are: GNOME, KDE, OpenOffice, Zope, GIMP and our own project, Plone. Congratulations to all the deserving projects! Check out the announcement here."
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Winners of O'Reilly's COMDEX Contest Anounced More

Winners of O'Reilly's COMDEX Contest Anounced

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  • This was not an accident (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I work for O'Reilly and am therefore posting anonymously. While this was done on purpose, it was by a sole author, and not a decision by O'Reilly. That developer has since got a first post.

  • A POST FOR PEOPLE REPEATING HISTORY... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    OMG, How could they forget about [Insert Project Name Here] or [Insert Project Name Here] or [Insert Project Name Here] or [Insert Project Name Here].

  • Number of votes? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by c_oflynn ( 649487 ) on Friday November 07, 2003 @07:46PM (#7421736)
    Top amount of votes was only 1690. Pretty good amount, but really I would expect more... I mean a slashdot poll had 20000 responses for the top choice!!

  • Are people surprised? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by obsidianpreacher ( 316585 ) on Friday November 07, 2003 @07:50PM (#7421759)
    Is anyone surprised that the six most well-known (not necessarily "the best", althought I do love them all) projects are the ones that were voted in? Projects that people "in-the-know" (hopefully those going to COMDEX) will already know about? Where are the smaller projects, or other ideas/programs, so they can receive more mainstream publicity?

    I'm honestly not trying to troll here, but just wondering why KDE would be sent, for example, rather than a lesser-known OSS project.

    • Not just name-recognition (Score:5, Insightful)

      by supton ( 90168 ) on Friday November 07, 2003 @07:57PM (#7421811) Homepage
      From a user who uses every piece of software on that list, I have to disagree.

      Sure KDE was a winner - but number one in the vote tally was Plone. Why? Becuase Plone has a large, enthusiastic community. Plone is faily new in the grand scheme of things, compared to these other projects. Why Plone got the most votes is that it has a lot of the most "finishing work" of many projects - it will be a good ambassador for open-source products and frameworks.

      Sure, the KDE, GIMP, GNOME, and OpenOffice folks have been around for a while, and obviously get in on both quality and recognition, but it's important to see that Zope and Plone also are getting a lot of deserved attention at the same level as these other four well-known open-source projects.
    • While I agree with what you're saying, I think that these six projects are projects the people want to present as examples of how successful OSS can be.

      If COMDEX were only about OSS, then I think the focus would be more on up-and-coming projects. However, open-source is still very much in the up-and-coming catagory itself and I think that this is a necessary step in order to bring OSS even more into the mainstream.

  • Zope wins twice (Score:5, Informative)

    by PineHall ( 206441 ) on Friday November 07, 2003 @07:50PM (#7421764)
    Plone is built on Zope, so Zope really wins twice.
  • It is nice to see this sort of development being publically applauded at a venue like COMDEX.

    Visibilty of Open Source products can only be beneficial and certainly this venue adds credibility.

    One must wonder though if the impact is wasted on the big exhibitors who are there to hawk their wares.

    I mean, do you think Bill Gates is going to stop by, then turn around and say "Ballmer, we need to go open source!"

    Nonetheless, I'd applaud a change in the tactics of Open Source that resulted in enough commer

  • Is it just me, or does plone (minus the tabs) look like just about every other opensource CMS site around? It seems like eventually a new design would break the CMS mold and not go for the choices on the sides, content down the middle look.

    • You are missing an important distinction... (Score:4, Informative)

      by supton ( 90168 ) on Friday November 07, 2003 @08:09PM (#7421884) Homepage
      ...that Plone's UI (esp. in 2.0 beta) is modular. It is Section 508 and W3C WAI compliant. It also can be rendered on mobile-phones, large-format, and presentation/print CSS devices without need for ANY changes to the HTML output or multiple sets of templates. From an architecture and extensibility standpoint, Plone's UI is really best-in-class. It also has the largest and most diverse audience and user-base of any open-source CMS, as well as formal standards for process improvement (the PLIP process), which definitely aides in the UI development/refinement process.
      • It is Section 508 and W3C WAI compliant...

        Wow, Plone has that much buzzword compliance? Must try it right away. Can't wait to test the PLIP process on my 24-character mobile phone display!! 5w337!

        • not just buzzwords! (Score:4, Insightful)

          by supton ( 90168 ) on Friday November 07, 2003 @09:00PM (#7422074) Homepage
          Make fun of "buzzwords" if you will, but getting open-source into government and private-enterprise that works with government is important, and lack of accessibility is a deal-breaker for those kinds of projects. Standards are important to doing business with technology - that's the process you go through to generate something called money (perhaps you've heard of this, no?).
        • We're looking at decent-sized departmental website set up in PHP-Nuke & wondering whether it will be worth the bother to try for Section 508 compliance. Man, it would be great not to have to worry about this. It would be great just for the changes necessary to be practical. Yeah, this is a real thing.
          Kid, don't try this at home.
  • With the possible exception of Plone (just heard of it today) all of the other people involved, would have been going to comdex already..

  • Cluestick: Get new names. (Score:1, Troll)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I swear, the people who create these projects should be beaten:

    ==

    (1) GIMP [reference.com]

    gimp - n : disability of walking due to crippling of the legs or feet [syn: lameness, limping, gimpiness, gameness, claudication]

    (2) GNOME [reference.com]

    gnome - A dwarf; a goblin; a person of small stature or misshapen features, or of strange appearance.

    ==

    Am I to gather that combined they form a small crippled old man? Yessir, those names sure make *me* want to use those products...
    • If there's a list like, "And the winners are, Bink, Shputz, GBR (goober), Splong, VORKO, and Dwinky!"

      But DON'T, for God's sake, tell fans of the products that they projects might benefit from name upgrades, nooo. You're assaulted with logic like: "Screw you, bastard! I've been using Splong for two years, and it's the best thing ever and marketing should be called moroning and Splong is a cool name anyway and you're just stoopid, you cocksucking ape!"

      No. I gave up. My next open source work is going under

      • Here's one for you to sue! :-)

        http://splong.free.fr/
      • And another:

        http://www.vorko.pl/

        Do they make vacuum cleaners?

        Schputz, I don't want to touch.
      • Let's break this down:

        KDE & GNOME: They are acronyms --- K Desktop Environment and GNU Network Object Model Environment. They're really no worse then all the acronyms used in the commercial world --- CDE, CORBA, COM, MFC, etc.

        OpenOffice: This is weirder than MS Office how?

        GIMP: GNU Image Manipulation Program. Again, its a perfectly sensible acronym. Okay, so Photoshop is sexier, but the computer industry is comfortable with acronyms --- so GIMP is actually a pretty conservative name as far as things
      • If there's a list like, "And the winners are, Bink, Shputz, GBR (goober), _Splong_, VORKO, and Dwinky!"

        You misspelled "Spoing". :)

        But DON'T, for God's sake, tell fans of the products that they projects might benefit from name upgrades, nooo.

        Agreed. One of my recient favorites is referred to as "DCL" at work. Calling it by it's full real name Double Choco Latte [sourceforge.net] would not get any management sign off. DCL, though, sounds like a serious product. Though the logo for Double Choco Latte is nice, I've wh

    • Good point. Instead, we should use ones like Windows, Pingus, or Nova.

  • Slashdot in Plone? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by frostman ( 302143 ) on Friday November 07, 2003 @08:45PM (#7422017) Homepage Journal
    I just had a look at the Plone site and I like it.

    Can we have Slashdot in Plone now please?

    Seriously though, it would make a great CMS migration case study.

    • Slashdot in Plone? Done! (Score:4, Informative)

      by axxackall ( 579006 ) on Saturday November 08, 2003 @09:48AM (#7423799) Homepage Journal
      Can we have Slashdot in Plone now please?

      Done, it's called Zope Zen [zopezen.org].

      Seriously though, it would make a great CMS migration case study

      Speaking about case studies, check available docs, alive borads and screenshots for NeoBoard [zoper.net] and CMFBoard [cmfboard.org]. As you can see - both are developing in the same direction (kind of mixing Slashdot and PHPBB ideas), and both have already achived very similar quality and functionality levels, dispite the fact that CMFBoard was mostly developed from scratch (although under strong influence of many ideas from other available boards), while NeoBoard was re-written from PHP to Plone by the original PHP developer of the original PHP-based NeoBoard.

  • Excellent! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mikemcc ( 4795 ) on Friday November 07, 2003 @08:50PM (#7422037)
    Excellent news. I've been using zope and plone for a few months now for intranet projects at my employer, and I am very, very impressed with that software stack. The plone 2.0 betas illustrate the the Plone team has some extremely talented UI people. I look forward to reading more about these technologies.

  • Why is GNOME before KDE in the list? (Score:3, Informative)

    by jokkebk ( 175614 ) on Friday November 07, 2003 @09:39PM (#7422228) Homepage
    Is it just me, or did anybode else wonder the order of the winners in the story?

    I mean, it isn't alphabetical, it isn't ordered by the amount of votes. Mentioning Plone last because it has a comment attached is reasonable, but moving GNOME from the bottom of the list in front of KDE and preserving the order otherwise was odd.

    The first thought that occurred to me was "so, the GNOME seems to have beaten KDE", so I was slightly surprised when I read the O'Reilly announcement.

  • My Criteria (Score:2, Interesting)

    by NEW22 ( 137070 )
    I voted a few times in the contest. My votes were for OpenOffice.org, Audacity, and VNC. Both VNC and OpenOffice.org (especially!) have made my job easier and saved a lot of money in my overwhelmingly Windows workplace. Audacity is just great, and fun. Aside from my personal like of the programs, they all share the feature that they are cross-platform. It doesn't seem so useful to me to go to a conference showcasing your software, then when its all said and done, someone realized they would have to cha

  • KDE vs GNOME (Score:2, Interesting)

    by tehanu ( 682528 )
    I noticed that KDE has more than twice the number of votes that GNOME does (in fact KDE came 2nd whilst GNOME came 6th). Either this means KDE has a lot more users than GNOME or it means that KDE users are much more enthusiastic about their desktop than GNOME users (and hence more likely to vote for said desktop). Actually I must admit, I wonder if there are any statistics on the popularity of GNOME vs the popularity of KDE. As far as I can tell all of the major distros except Red Hat come with KDE as th
    • I don't think the numbers reflect anything else than enthusiasm from the users - which is an interesting measure in itself. We were ranked as #1, even though we probably have less users than any of the other projects on the list, we're also the "new kid on the block".

    • Re:KDE vs GNOME (Score:4, Interesting)

      by be-fan ( 61476 ) on Saturday November 08, 2003 @12:11AM (#7422779)
      In a survey done by EDC [evansdata.com] KDE is used by 65% of Linux developers, while GNOME is used by 56% (some overlap). So I'd guess that KDE's userbase is a bit larger --- remember a lot of Linux users are European, and the biggest distro there (SuSE) is very KDE-centric. Overall, I'd guess KDE has a slightly larger userbase.

      The other reason is probably that KDE users are rabid, frothing-at-the-mouth maniacs. In my experience, they're much more enthusiastic than GNOME users. Compare the popularity of dot.kde.org vs gnomedesktop.org (the major news sites for each desktop) and the popularity of kdelook.org vs the popularity of art.gnome.org.

      PS> I say the above as a KDE user :)

      • Re:KDE vs GNOME (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        gnomedesktop is a lot more fun. There are regular user v developer battles fought in the stories, and plenty of criticism of GNOME and its direction... all very healthy. And you end up learning plenty.

        Compare this with dot.kde.org -- the userbase is sycophantic and rabid... and the admin of the site actively deletes anything critical of KDE, its direction or current implementation.

    • Either this means KDE has a lot more users than GNOME or it means that KDE users are much more enthusiastic about their desktop than GNOME users (and hence more likely to vote for said desktop).

      About my habits and preferences: I am a GNOME user and a fairly new XFce user, I might make XFce the default session (currently it is GNOME) on next OS upgrade when I get the new 4.x version of XFce, and even then, I would definitely be keeping and using GNOME (not abandoning it all together). I use KDE for trying

    • Erm, how about people who voted for KDE __and__ gnome?

      I did. I voted for KDE, GNOME, and OpenOffice. The KDE and GNOME communities aren't mutually exclusive for any means. Many people just voted for software that they consider important.
  • Okay, so it's a content management system... I get that. What I'm curious about is whether Plone would be useful for things on a small scale -- for instance, a site that has a few (maybe five) people who can update it, and require no review or workflow to do so. Is it good for this, or is it too complicated for simple needs?
    • Yes, you can easily remove the workflow or make an ultra-simple one like private/published. It might be overkill for your use, but if you have an hour to try it out, it's probably the easiest content management system to install and set up out there.

    • Plone obviously scales well, but is also very easy to use for quickly getting started with small-group content management. Consider this:

      • Plone is easy to install - get Andy McKay's Win32 installer or Jim Roepcke's Mac OS X installer Get 'em here [plone.org] and you will be up and running in 10 minutes with a Plone site pre-configured by the installer. Also you can get RPM or DEB packages.
      • Default workflow and content types let you hit the road running: you have documents, news items, events, images, etc.
      • Customizat

  • Innovation (Score:4, Insightful)

    by The Herbaliser ( 660976 ) on Friday November 07, 2003 @11:00PM (#7422518)
    I hate to say this, but two of the selections seem to have the primary purpose of duplicate functionality found in proprietary applications. Should we really be celebrating pieces of software that while powerful, really don't provide anything remotely new or original, and are basically knockoffs of MS and Adobe products (although OO's embrace of XML is kind of cool)?

    It almost seems as though those two selections help to validate many of the criticisms that have been made regarding the open-source model: namely that it lacks true innovation. Many projects, including some of the selections prove such suggestions to be false. I just think it's a shame that projects have been included that have really contributed very little to the advancement of the field.

    • Re:Innovation (Score:3, Informative)

      by Malcontent ( 40834 )
      There is nothing wrong with trying to get OSS replacements for commercial software. MS has "embraced" all kinds of innovations from it's competitors for years now.

      Are you really suggesting that OSS should not have an office suite or a GUI because someone else thought of it first?
      • You're right, there is nothing wrong with trying to make open-source competitors to commercial software.

        And I'm also not suggesting that an OSS shouldn't have an office suite or a GUI because someone else thought of it first.

        What I do think, is that when they are open-source tools that do things better than their non-open competitors, and have introduced new and innovative features, we're instead highlighting projects like GIMP and OpenOffice, that are essentially just knockoffs.

        I'm not saying we shouldn
        • "What I do think, is that when they are open-source tools that do things better than their non-open competitors, and have introduced new and innovative features, we're instead highlighting projects like GIMP and OpenOffice, that are essentially just knockoffs."

          I guess it's kind of a push for me. OO is not without innovation. For example take the fact that it could be scripted with many languages. To me the biggest "innovation" in OO is the fact that it's format is 100% documented. That enables projects lik

    • Re:Innovation (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Hylander ( 82626 )
      I have to disagree with this. I've been using Zope and Plone for about six months now, and they have some of the most innovative stuff in them I have seen for a long time.

      Seriously, go check them out. Once you're up to speed on Acquisition, ZODB Persistence, Zope Page Templates, Plone customisation and the rest of it, come back and tell me it's not innovative!

      Seriously, this technology owns.
      • I think Zope and Plone are great innovative products and I had them in mind when I said that certain projects disprove the suggestion that open source is not about innovation. I just wish more innovative projects like Zope and Plone had been selected.
    • Should we really be celebrating pieces of software that while powerful, really don't provide anything remotely new or original, and are basically knockoffs of MS and Adobe products

      And Microsoft Word was a knock-off of StarWriter and WordPerfect, which were in their own rights knock-offs of previous generation word processors. The advancement of the field is sometimes slow, and it's sometime apparently stagnant as we work on elaborating the current state of the art before we can figure out which direction
  • GNOME won the most unintuitive GUI award and the worst overall window manger award.
  • Seriously. I thought they were bankrupt (the local paper had a story about a former Comdex marketing rep reduced to selling Tupperware).

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