And now, the open source software community has the Open Source Awards.
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Read more about the winners of the 2004 Open Source Awards:
Julian Seward for Valgrind
Sooner or later, in the life of every developer, you'll have to turn to a debugger. There's only so much you can do with embedded println statements. For the Linux-on-Intel-x86 crowd, one of the most popular options available is Julian Seward's valgrind. It works by emulating the Intel CPU so that it can see exactly what your program is doing, and it is a fair match for commercially available Linux debuggers such as Purify, at a fraction of the price—free. Read more about Mr. Seward and his remarkable
debugger.
VideoLAN
Can a university in Paris, France challenge the might of Seattle's Microsoft and Real Networks in the streaming multimedia game? Absolutely—VideoLAN started as a school project, but it has blossomed into a full-featured solution for streaming media on the Web. It handles multimedia streaming of MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, and DivX files, DVDs, digital satellite channels, digital terrestial television channels, and live video. Plus, it's truly cross-platform, running on various Linux flavors as well as on Mac OS X and Windows. Read more
about VideoLAN and the team that helped create it.
Paul Davis for Jack
What would you do if you found that the only way to get audio from one application into another was by running a cable from your sound card's speaker jack into the microphone jack? If you're Paul Davis, you start an open source community project. Two years ago, Mr. Davis realized that one of the critical issues in multimedia being truly useful on Linux was the question of how to get different audio applications to talk to each other. This is exactly what the Jack Audio Connection Kit (JACK) does. Read more about Paul Davis and the
audio API he helped create.
Pango
Those of us based in the United States tend to forget this fact, but not everyone on the World Wide Web uses English as their primary language. This is where Pango comes in—to provide a framework for the layout and rendering of internationalized text. Using Unicode for all of its encoding, Pango can potentially render any language. It just requires someone in the open source community to create the language-specific pieces that Pango needs to make that rendering possible. Read more about how
Pango is trying to bring order to this Tower of Babel.
And more to come…
There will be additional bronze awards granted throughout the year, and this summer the OSI committee will announce the Grand Master and Special awards during the O'Reilly
Open Source Convention.