SourceForge announced the winners of its Community Choice Awards at the O’Reilly Group’s OSCON open source convention.

With a field of open source projects (not necessarily hosted on SourceForge.net) to choose from, voters decided on winners in 12 category. Some of those categories seemed rather tongue in cheek, but I suppose they add more colour to the proceedings. The entire list is up on SourceForge.net but have a gander here:

Best Project: OpenOffice.org
Best Project for the Enterprise : OpenOffice.org
Best Project for Educators: OpenOffice.org
Most Likely to Be the Next $1B Acquisition: phpMyAdmin

Best Project for Multimedia: VLC
Best Project for Gamers: XBMC

Most Likely to Change the World: Linux
Best New Project: Magento
Most Likely to Be Ambiguously and Baselessly Accused of Patent Violation: Wine Is Not an Emulator
Most Likely to Get Users Sued by Anachronistic Industry Associations Defending Dead Business Models: eMule
Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins: phpMyAdmin
Best Tool or Utility for Developers: Notepad++

OpenOffice.org swept the most titles – three, in fact. It won best project overall, the killer prize, as well winning best project for enterprise and the education areas. Yes, OpenOffice.org certainly proved a powerful alternative to Microsoft Office and managed to entice governments to make the switch to Open Office. But seriously, were there no other contenders in the enterprise space or education space in that matter?

Then there’s Linux – the whole “Likely to Change the World” spiel is getting old, dudes.

One thing the award highlighted is the lack of publicity garnered by other noteworthy projects. What about Blender, the 3D graphics software that’s not quite Maya but is still capable of creating impressive feature film-worthy graphics? Aren’t there more names out there, more projects being worked on rather than the same old projects? The question here is – did OpenOffice really deserve the award or did it just win for being the most familiar name? It would be a revelation if Open Source creates something a bit more life-changing than an office suite.

Related:

Entry was posted on Saturday, July 26th, 2008 at 10:59 pm under Open source, Uncategorized.

Read more entries by Erna Mahyuni.
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