New Zealand Open Source Awards 2010
August 18th, 2010 at 4:00 pm by David FarrarThe NZ Open Source Awards 2010 have opened for nominations, They can be for:
- the contributions of New Zealanders to free and open source projects and free and open source philosophy
- exemplary use of free and open source by New Zealand organisations.
Categories include:
- Open Source Use in Government
- Open Source Use in Business
- Open Source Use in Education
- Open Source Use in the Arts
- Open Source Software Project
- Open Source Contributor
- Open Source Advocate
- Open Source People’s Choice Award
Nominations close on 15 September 2010.
I am a big fan of open source software – not because of the often lower cost, but because it leads to such great innovation when people from all over the world are free to take existing software and modify it.
I’m proud to be one of the judges for the 2010 awards, so am looking forward to seeing the entries come in.
Related posts:
- Open Source Awards Finalists
- Open Source Software
- NZ Open Source Awards Night
- Open Source in the Public Sector
August 18th, 2010 at 8:26 pm
Open source is good and I make use of it often with web design or using PC repair tools (boot & password recovery disks) but quite a lot can be shite due to a variety of reasons. You get what you pay for, or not, at times.
Vote:August 18th, 2010 at 11:21 pm
I use mostly Open source myself – this netbook has Firefox, Open Office, Filezilla, the GIMP, and VLC. I’d love to get the rest of the Sensible Sentencing Trust onto open source software, but Microsoft got there first,and I dont have the time to take them all through it in the Napier Office…
Regards
Vote:Peter Jenkins
Webmaster for Sensible Sentencing Trust
August 19th, 2010 at 8:51 am
Open source is all very well… until the person who put it in place leaves.
Then the new guy has to figure it out, or pay the old guy consultancy rates to come back and fix it.
And yes, I do have a real example in mind.
I remember it being all the rage around 2000, but the movement seems to have cooled somewhat since then. It’s no magic bullet.
Vote:August 19th, 2010 at 10:20 am
I migrated a desktop and laptop to GNU Linux from MS Vasta and Win7 earlier this year. I’m using openSUSE (German engineering!). It’s fast, stable, secure, fully featured, and beautiful. And it’s free (free as in ‘free beer’, but also philosophically free as in ‘free speech’). I’ve learnt more about computers and operating systems since making the switch than in the years of being a power Microsoft user.
@scrubone – libre software (eg, Linux) is winning. It’s everywhere (except on the desktop – < 2% – maybe this year will be the year of the Linux desktop?): embedded devices, smartphones (Android, which is whipping Apple overseas), supercomputers (including Weta), servers, etc. Plus userland applications, including popular cross-platform software (eg, Firefox, VLC, OpenOffice, etc). Google, Facebook and Twitter are powered by Linux (I bet this site is too).
The strength and, perhaps, occasional weakness, of libre software is that is developed by a community. But increasingly, those developers are paid and employed by companies like Google, IBM, RedHat, etc. Developers must make their code available to anyone who gets the software, and they have to make it all available under the same terms they received the software. Thus, you always have access to the source code, unlike proprietary software. And you can modify and redistribute the code, but it must be contributed back to the community.
Microsoft is in a gentle decline and Apple is the new Microsoft (perhaps worse than MS, with a completely closed ecosystem of hardware, software and services).
Vote: