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The 2000 Beanies

Slashdot is Giving Away $100,000 151

Posted by CmdrTaco from the why-the-hell-not dept.
So to kick off the new year, Andover.Net decided that we ought to give away a lot of money. We're excited to announce the 2000 Slashdot Beanie Awards. No, we're not giving away 2000 beanies, but we are giving away prizes ranging from $30k for Most Improved Open Source Project to $10k awards for things like Unsung Hero and Best Community Advocate. You can read the awards index, where you can also discuss the categories as well as place your nominations. Or you can read on to see a list of awards and a description of the nomination and voting process.

Nomination

Let's be honest here. If Hemos and I sat down in a room and tried to pick the nominees for each catagory ourselves, either we would have the five members of Monty Python nominated for every category or only one of us would emerge from the room alive. And then whoever lived would get flamemail because we forgot to include Carol Cleveland (who really deserved to be nominated for Best Unix Eyecandy).

We didn't want to deal with that. So instead we've opened up the nominations. Each registered Slashdot user is allowed to nominate one person or project in each category. Each category will have a Slashdot discussion attached to it where you can chit chat about the nominees. And everyone can change their vote as many times as they want (until the nominations close in 2 weeks).

The nominations are blind... you can't see who is winning until...

Voting

Voting will function the same way. You can talk amongst yourselves, and each registered user is allowed one vote which can be changed all you want until we close the contest. The winners will be announced at the next LinuxWorld in New York.

The Categories

The Grand Prize ($30,000)

  • Most Improved Open Source Project

Ten Thousand Dollar Awards

  • Most Improved Kernel Module
  • Unsung Hero
  • Best Newbie Helper
  • Most Deserving Open Source Charity
  • Best Open Source Advocate

Two Thousand Dollar Awards

  • Best Unix Desktop Eyecandy
  • Best Unix Desktop Earcandy
  • Best Desktop Theme
  • Best Open Source-Related Book
  • Best Perl Module
  • Best Apache Module
  • Best Open Source Text Editor
  • Best Deserving of a $2,000 Award
  • Best Designed Interface in a Graphical Application
  • Best Designed Interface in a Non-Graphical Application

Why The Hell Nots (A Beanie, and a Hug from CowboyNeal)

  • Best Dressed
  • Favorite Slashdot Comment Poster
  • Favorite Slashdot Author
  • Best Slashdot Story of 1999
  • Big Dumb Patent Bully
  • Big Dumb Domain Bully
  • Clue Stick Award for FUD in Journalism
  • The Hemos Award (only Hemos is eligible)
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Slashdot Starts Nominations For $100k Beanie Awards More

Slashdot Starts Nominations For $100k Beanie Awards

Comments Filter:
  • It's not clear whether you intend this to be a linux-only deal, or whether any free software related people can be nominated. For instance, is 'best kernel module' supposed to be 'best linux kernel module' or what?

  • Why not Most Interesting New Idea? (Score:3)

    by Zigg ( 64962 ) on Monday January 03, 2000 @03:57AM (#1412201)

    Seems to me that a large portion of the Open Source stuff out there is just rewriting things that've already been invented. The people who are inventing new things don't get the attention they deserve.

    Why not give an award for new ideas? If Open Source wants to survive, it needs to innov... inn... innova... invent new things. (Sorry, couldn't bring myself to say it... the term has been tarnished forever...)



  • Could you give out one of those battery powered motor-beanies :-) I used to have a real beany with a propeller on it but I gave it to my (now ex) girlfriend. Still looking for another like it.

  • maybe I just got to work too early, but the first thing that popped to mind when I read that title was that slashdot was giving away $100k worth of Beanie Babies.


    I'm glad to see I was wrong. :)
  • I've nominated Mike Heins as a unsung hero in open source software. His package, Minivend (www.minivend.com), is important to e-commerce behind the scenes and rivals the most expensive propietary systems. He works very hard on this software and releases it all under the GPL.
  • Shouldn't we all know better than to use 10k or 30k when we really mean 10000 or 30000? C'mon, when is all this k nonsense going to stop?
  • My first thought was a Beanie Baby worth $100K, like that million dollar bra from Victoria's Secret. Y'know the people have spoken and told the company to keep making them.
  • There was a Calvin and Hobbes strip where he sent away for a motorized beanie, expecting to be able to fly with it he was pretty bummed out when he got it and it did not.
  • If you can imagine a Beanie Baby like a Victoria's secret bra, yup, you're weird.
  • The very existence of Microsoft, its software, and its tactics continues to provide the drive and energy for Open Source gurus to continue churning out the superior software.

    It also drives the many passionate fans of Open Source to keep promoting the virtues of Open Source.

    Without the Evil Empire, the whole Open Source movement would be without a focal point and without direction!

    All hail Microsoft for creating the environment where a whole new culture could develop and thrive!!

  • hey... (Score:2)

    by Zurk ( 37028 )
    how bout contributing $100K to freshmeat so they can mirror all the opensource projects on their site ? That way, if a website shuts down we dont loose that project forever...and its a helluva lot better than giving it away for nothing.

  • you know, I don't really like this idea (Score:4)

    by tap ( 18562 ) on Monday January 03, 2000 @04:30AM (#1412214) Homepage
    "Person most deserving $2000" What kind of award is that? Better to call it best ballot stuffer. Unsung hero? If no one knows about someone's work, who is going to know to vote for them?

    I always hated school sponsored popularity contests, where all the jocks and cheerleaders get to give themselves awards and see who had the most friends. Is this really all that different? Doing stuff like this creates resent among all those who feel left out. Especially since most open source work is a group effort, to single one person out is a slap in the face to all those whose work is ignored.

    I suppose none of this matters, since we already know who will get all these awards, Linus Torvalds, Alan Cox, Larry Wall, Apache, XFree86, etc.

  • Re:Unsung Hero - Mike Heins (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This is what is needed if Open Source is going to stay relevant and inventive. The most finely tuned SMP kernel is still just a hobbyist oddity if it's used as a server to host other Open Source projects or even as an ISP workhorse hosting "my cat photo" sites.

    It won't matter if all the e-commerce management people say "yeah whatever that's neato, here's $100k now order me 5 Windows2000 systems with Eshop-til-NT-drops (tm) pre-installed".

  • A contest designed for Red Hat, Debian, and GNOME (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 03, 2000 @04:50AM (#1412217)
    Being some of the only Linux groups that get favorable postings on Slashdot, I'm sure members of the three groups in the subject will be pleased. And I'm sure the rest of us can go pound sand.

    I, for one, will not be voting for this very reason. Slashdot occasionally presents an even handed view of the Linux landscape, but the congretation here is so biased I find it odd that Andover.net would authorize something like this contest to take place. It's like opening up a vote on whether gun control is a good idea knowing that only NRA members have received word of the contest. This contest is guaranteed to be skewed.

    Don't even get me started on all the perl hackers out there who -- as we speak -- are customizing their scripts to help skew the results.

    If Andover was serious about this contest, it would set up another web site (rumor has it that it's an Internet company, after all), leave the Slashdot moniker off of it, then let ALL Linux news sites carry word of its existence and let the community in general vote. Without that, I can't take this contest seriously.

    Flame away...
  • Clearly this is a plot by Andover.net to start the flamewar of a lifetime and leave the open source community a smoldering plain of ashes. Microsoft must be behind this.
    --

  • We are very aware there are some very good coders out there...

    What we need to do with awards like this is support the folks who write howtos and help pages and even books about Linux and open source.

    Some of us, ( I am thinking of me ) used to be great C and ASM coders back about 15 years ago and now ( at least me ) is far to tired to keep up with you young smart dudes. However i want to and am going to write a few articles and perhaps a newbie book about Linux.


    I recognize your skills.. i used to have them but they are gone. But I am sure I can write...

    In your awards consider those folks too.


  • Seriously, I agree with the other posts. What happened to Slashdot the news organization? I'm getting sick of Slashdot the open source advocate.

    Not that I'm against open source, but you guys have gone way off course. Suck.com's parody was right on target when one of the headlines read "Linux possibly defamed somewhere"

    "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." Not anymore.

    - overflow
  • I nominate Hemos for The Hemos Award.
  • Darn you... you stole my idea for a post! =) I mean seriously, let's try a bit of truth in advertising. Sure, Slashdot posts news items of general interest to geeks, but probably 30%-50% of the stories are open source, and these awards are almost exclusively so. I'd really like to see a scaling back of the Open Source rhetoric/hysteria/oversaturation.

  • Too bad it isn't run as a real contest (Score:4)

    by Smack ( 977 ) on Monday January 03, 2000 @05:35AM (#1412226) Homepage
    What's the point of retroactively awarding people? Why not use the money as an incentive to coders, like a contest?

    Especially since there are glaring problems in the categories. The first issue is the ones where I can already pick the final winner.

    Big Dumb Patent Bully == Amazon
    Big Dumb Domain Bully == etoys
    Clue Stick Award for FUD in Journalism = MSNBC

    Is there any point to these, when all they'll do is attract flamebait?

    Then there's the ones where 90% of the voters will go "Huh??". Like:

    Best Perl Module
    Most Improved Kernel Module
    Best Newbie Helper

    Does the standard Slashdot reader have any clue on these? Personally, I can't even suggest a single nomination off the top of my head.

    So wouldn't this money be better served by using it for a CONTEST? That $30,000 for "Most Improved Open Source Project" is one hell of an incentive for the lone coder to get off their ass and start developing. Instead we'll probably just award some crappy half assed Microsoft UI imitator that has a lot of name recognition. *cough* KDE *cough* Go Slashdot!

  • My favorite gnu utility has to be screen.
    For those of you that don't know what screen does, its basically a window manager for your shell sessions. screen 3.09.05 lets you connect more than one session to a screen. I can run my text windows at home, and then connect to them from work seamlessly. It's a cool toy, and probably the most useful gnu thing i've installed lately.

  • Re:How about . . . (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I know that other countries exist, I just dont care. America, last of the superpowers and damn proud of it
  • sourceforge.net [sourceforge.net], nice hardware specs [sourceforge.net] too...
  • I didn't nominate too many categories, but the following rationale applies three of those I did:

    Most Improved OS Project: Livid (the Linux DVD Project) - Not only has playing DVDs under Linux gone from a pipe-dream to reality (if still a little rough around the edges) in a very short time, but with the help of DeCSS/css-auth it could be ready for prime time in the very near future. Additonally, the project is very important for the consumer/desktop usability of Linux, and could use the $10k cash to fend off additional legal thuggary from the DVD Forum.

    Best UNIX desktop earcandy: xmms - the audio app I use more often than my television or stereo. (Though Myth2 Soul Blighter was a temptation)

    Clue Stick Award for FUD in Journalism: Declan McCullagh of Wired -- not only did this person's poor reporting precipitate serious legal troubles for developers of css-auth (the Linux DVD css component), but he remained unapologetic throughout and, even worse, followed up with even more damaging FUD after having been informed of the errors in his reporting. His behavior on the livid development mailing list was unprofessional and reprehensibe, where he even went so far as to flame Livid developers without provocation. I only wish the archives were still up to link to here ...
  • Not only was I shocked to see Andover buy Slashdot from the geeks, but I am even more shocked to see the amount of money they're putting into it. Sure, Slashdot is good publicity for Andover, as we all know Slashdot has a large, and somewhat dedicated following. Having looked at the pictures of Andover's area at a few conferences / events in the Linux world, and couldn't help but laugh at the Slashdot sign, tilted up for all to see. It's quite interesting that a website that started as a fun way for Malda to show the world about Linux, and the news that surrounded it, became a website that is sponsored by a huge company with lots of money, and a website that is gaining more and more attention everyday.

    Don't get me wrong, I love Slashdot, and I commend each and every person who's put work into the Slash code and who has made Slashdot into what it is today, but I think that if Andover can afford $100,000 for a simple contest, the amount Malda, Bates and Oostendorp (sorry if I spelt that wrong) are getting should also be remotely close to that high figure. By the way the authors post on Slashdot, this high figure is not being received.. unless they just don't want us to know that they make 3 times the amount of the prizes in the "Beanie Awards".

    Slashdot for me used to be a place where I didn't have to worry about commercializing everything available, but now I see it as a de-sensitized company jumping on the bandwagon of all the other profitable websites. Too bad this one story changed my point of view.

    Matthew
    _____________________________________
  • Ralf has been a big submitter to the RTEMS project and I would like to see him recognized. Among numerous other development projects, he has ported RTEMS to the Hitachi SH family, converted much of the RTEMS Makefile structure to GNU automake, and ported other open source packages such as Tcl to RTEMS.

  • best dressed, silly :-) (Score:3)

    by gnarphlager ( 62988 ) on Monday January 03, 2000 @06:32AM (#1412239) Homepage
    I was trying to think of what I'd qualify for. Most people don't know who the hell I am, and usually people aren't too kind to my postings (after all I don't like South Park ;-), so I figured that I have to qualify for best dressed. Why? Let me count the ways:
    • my large collection of silk paisly shirts. Paisly is ALWAYS cool :-)
    • black buttondown with black tie and somehow look neither goth nor Johnny Cash.
    • proud owner of the Ugliest Jacket Known To Man(tm) . . . I'd show it to you, but you likely won't want to see it ;-)
    • 1999 was the end of a long reign for one pork pie hat, and the beginning of a new one. Corderoy this time. How can you go wrong?!?!?!
    • t-shirts ranging from O'Reily, to Sluggy Freelance, to Swans. Something for everyone
    • because you know you should love me *bats eyelashes*


    so vote for me. I'll give you a cookie. One per vote if I win :-)

  • C'mon, guys, why link to the domain of some slob trying to get the Python people to buy a domain from him? Link to the real site [pythonline.com].

    --Matt
  • *ahem* Naked and petrified guy

  • Screen ruled! I used that for years when I had to use a regular dialup to get to a host. It was indespensible.

    But then I got a SLIP/PPP connection instead of a shell dialup, and screen's usefulness kinda faded away. Why bother running screen when you can just open a bunch of telnet windows? So I deleted it from my ISP account in order to free up some disk space.

    I had my screen binary's permissions set so that everyone could use it. (What a warm 'n' cozy ISP this was, where people actually knew each other and shared stuff on the shell host.) When I nuked my copy, I got a bunch of complaints. Whoops! Some people still used it, after all, and there was much scrambling to the archie servers that day...


    ---

  • Re:$100,000.00 - for the love of humanity (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    malda and bates are millionaires now. what, you didnt know?
  • I nominate Advogato [advogato.org] for best open source advocate. While the better-known open source advocates have been racking up major publicity points for themselves and doing the impossibly hard work of selling big business the idea of software that doesn't cost them anything, Advogato has been working for the most part quietly to help the community of open source developers, the people who actually write all this code the rest of you are so fond of evangelizing.

    P.S. The rules said nothing about nominations not being allowed to be self-serving :)

  • Re:Too bad it isn't run as a real contest (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I like the idea of making this an incentive contest for coders (not that I have any say). As much as I appreciate Linus, Alan, RMS, etc., I think they feel loved enough at this point. There are lots more coders than just the Top Ten, so maybe it's time they started getting compensated (outside of an IPO that may-or-may-not pan out for them).

    If I had the money to blow, I surely wouldn't bother with Yet Another Linux Award; I'd give coders incentive to code more, or I'd put the money into funding something like the Open Documentation project, or... Well, you get the idea. That would be MUCH more productive in my opinion.
  • What's the problem? Andover.net has made a lot of money and they're contributing some of it for a good purpose. That's great! No need to rant...

  • Awards Nominations (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    • Most Improved Kernel Module: FreeBSD's Linux emulation module.

    • Unsung Hero: In descending order:
      • Kirk McKusick [mckusick.com], for his more than two decades of tireless service and personal sacrifices for our community.
      • Gurusamy Sarathy, Perl project release manager, responsible for bringing fork(2) to Microsoft ports of Perl and a million other things to make Perl code truly robust and portable between Microsoft and Unix platforms, a true Godsend for those of us forced to co-exist on both.
      • Malcolm Beattie, for trailblazing the Perl-to-C compiler, the Perl external byte-code interpreter, the first Perl/Tk implementation,threading in Perl, and safe blackbox compartments for mobile agents in Perl.

    • Best Newbie Helper: Mike Stok from comp.lang.perl.misc. He is patient and kind, never chiding nor arrogant. He has been doing this job for many years.

    • Most Deserving Open Source Charity: The Usenix Association [usenix.org]. They don't take sides. They promote technology and open standards while remaining vendor neutral. They promote all aspects of advanced technology, but are especially supportive of open source solutions. No organization has done more to legitimize us over the last twenty-five years.

    • Best Open Source Advocate: Larry Wall [wall.org]. He doesn't rant against anyone, tries to help everyone, and gives his code away for use by anyone, even Microsoft users. He doesn't restrict his good works to things that only benefit his friends. He doesn't preach, but lives by example.

    • Best Unix Desktop Eyecandy: The newest version of the randomizing X screensaver. It's really great in a room full of people on acid.

    • Best Unix Desktop Earcandy: The following entry in one's .Xdefaults file:
      *visualBell: on

    • Best Desktop Theme: ShinyMetal

    • Best Open Source-Related Book: In order of highest to lowest, all worthy of the award:

    • Best Perl Module: Damian Conway's Class::Multimethods [oreilly.com] module for traditional OO in Perl.

    • Best Apache Module: mod_perl [apache.org]; how can there be any question?

    • Best Open Source Text Editor: The vim [vim.org] editor (vi improved), complete with its gvim graphical incarnation and its perl and python plug-ins.

    • Best Deserving of a $2,000 Award:
      1. The late, great Rich Stevens's children's college fund
      2. Larry Wall's children's college fund
      3. Dennis Ritchie [bell-labs.com]'s retirement fund.
      (Perhaps those count as charities :-)

    • Best Designed Interface in a Graphical Application:
      1. The eesh shell for controlling Enlightenment.
      2. The ddd debugger
      3. MacOS X's environment.

    • Best Designed Interface in a Non-Graphical Application:
      1. The {Free,Open}BSD ports collection: being able to just cd and type make and have everything happen is the best thing that ever happened to third-parts apps.
      2. The make menuconfig directive for building Linux kernels.
      3. The v4.0 trn newsreader, with scoring and plug-ins.

    • Best Dressed: Larry Wall, whether he's wearing Hawaiian shirts, tie-dies, or best of all, his outlandish, pastel-coloured tuxedos.

    • Favorite Slashdot Comment Poster:
      1. Guy Harris
      2. Tom Christiansen
      3. Enoch Root
      4. Jay Maynard

    • Favorite Slashdot Author: David Brin wins this one hands down.

    • Best Slashdot Story of 1999: Eric Raymond's story about viruses on Microsoft vs Unix.

    • Big Dumb Patent Bully: Amazon, followed by Unisys.

    • Big Dumb Domain Bully: NSI, followed by Etoys.

    • Clue Stick Award for FUD in Journalism: Slashdot.

  • Pretty Funny (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Considering you are using Microsoft Hotmail.
  • It's interesting to see that half of these awards apply to Linux, or open source unixes only. Getting an award for a closed sourrce BeOS or Windows developer is definately a lot harder then it is for a Linux one (Which fits in virtually every category) Very dissapointing indeed. If Slashdot wishes to be percieved as an "unbiased news source" this is definately not the way to go.
    Flame away~
  • who?
    Mark Pauline: Head of Survival Research Laboratories [srl.org] and fundrasing manager for the etoy projects [rtmark.com]. His projects have been an inspiration to hardware and software hackers alike, blowing away anything you can make with a lego mindstorm. (You try shooting two-by-fours [srl.org] at a high rate of speed with legos...)

    Mark Pauline is the Bob Geldorf of cool technology projects. Where would we be without him pushing the limits?

    By the way. Toywar [toywar.com] is up and running

  • uh-oh, looks like somebody forgot to take his humor-pills this morning... Better fix it quick with a hefty dose of sarcastic anal-suppositories.

    -----------

    "You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

  • Look, you use GNOME, cuz you like it. I'll use KDE because I like it. And you know what? We'll both be happy. I guess since the teams of programmers are getting along, its up to people like you to keep the flames going.

    So why dont you droping the flaming and go code something?
  • I wish you'd log into the nominations forum
    and post these there because your list has some
    of the best suggestions I've seen so far and
    yet this needs to be posted in the niminations
    forums not here.
  • The ZD net interns.

    Allow me to be one of the many, many people to nominate the Ziff-Davis (ZD Group) in it's many forms.

    Their particular style of "rip and read" journalism, and complete lack of objectivity over the years, has earned them the respect and honor of only the most "clue starved" trolls all over the world. It is my belief that this perverse propagation of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) puts the ZD Group among the front runners in the race for a firm twack with the /. Cluestick.

    More to the point, I would like to nominate the hard work and dedication of the many ZDnet interns who (like so many sweatshop workers in a Nike factory) tirelessly toil to cut and paste microsoft press releases into Jerry Bursts' article of the day.

    ZDs' blatant pursuit of mediocrity makes them a prime candidate for The Cluestick Award for FUD in Journalism.
    _________________________

  • Oh man, that McCullagh guy is a jerk. I found the Livid archive at
    http://livid.on.openprojects. net/pipermail/livid-dev/ [openprojects.net]. You can see his posts in the Nove mber archive [openprojects.net].
  • I hearby announce my candidacy for 'Best dressed'.

    Some of you may be asking yourself why you should vote for me. Simple. Best dressed isn't what label you wear, whither or not the cufflinks are real gold, etc. It's how you use attitude to make the look work.

    Speaking as someone who successfully pulled off wide lapelled mohair at the formal company Christmas party, combat boots and leather jacket at innumerable weddings, and constantly gets positive comments about his misuse of military-surplus gear in the corporate work environment, I feel I deserve the award.
  • sourceforge does web hosting. i wasnt aware they automatically mirrored all freshmeat submissions...IMHO, i dont think they do. Anyway, /. should be giving to the community by providing services..not throwing money at some projects just cause they want to. if you have 100K to waste, the least andover could do is build some stuff for everyone to use for 100K..something like metalab for example.
  • Look, we all know that we spend more time playing games than most of these other things combined... so how about a category for best freely available game?
  • I'll have to agree with this. Projects like the Free Film Project [gnu.org] and Free Expresion [free-expression.org] are great and fairly innovative ideas that don't just deal specifically with software. but also include the ability for expansion and expression of different ideas by just about anyone. Maybe someday they can get some more recognition than they're getting now.

    I like the "Best new Idea award" idea. that doesn't sound right...but I think it makes sense.
  • Thanks for the link. The one in my bookmarks was no longer valid, and I couldn't find it on the new livid sight.
  • Oddly enough, I'd put up everything graphical I could come up with, _months_ ago. I didn't do this because I wanted to get an award, or because I thought anybody was going to jump around cheering: I did it because it was the right thing to do.

    I made a point of producing all these textures in .xpm format (_months_ ago) so they could be native Linux tiles and background textures. On the agenda, I need to go make .bmp versions of everything available for the underprivileged- I didn't know until recently that Windows could not use a simple gif or jpg as a background unless the hapless Windows user turned on Active Desktop.

    All these things are absolutely original work, put out there just to use with no strings attached and the sincere request of 'Just don't claim these as your own OK?'.

    http://www.airwindows.com/desktops/index.html [airwindows.com]- Desktop pictures

    http://www.airwindows.com/graphics/backgrounds/ind ex.html [airwindows.com]- Tiling backgrounds

    http://www.airwindows.com/graphics/tiles/index.htm l [airwindows.com]- Window manager tiles, including treatments such as vertically tiling effects and 3D effects, plus stuff like wood tiles with binding like on a guitar

    http://www.airwindows.com/graphics/titlebars/index .html [airwindows.com]- Intended as Window Maker titlebars, very likely usable in other WMs as well

    http://www.airwindows.com/graphics/webgifs/index.h tml [airwindows.com]- Textured but undistracting 'paper' backgrounds. All available in .xpm as well: designed to be completely compliant with the Web Safe 216 color palette.

    Anyone griping about there being gifs should be pleased that at least I don't have Windows .bmps yet ;) well, whatever. I'm sure Enlightenment is going to win or something, but I don't care- I have been fighting for a loan to get an ADAT recorder (to help people record unauthorized music and put out mp3s ;) ) and will keep on doing so. If I win $2000 I pledge I will buy a x86 Linux box to go with my PPC dualboot :)

    Cheers, slashdotters. *back to real life*

  • I'd have to nominate Dee Hock's book Birth of the Chaordic Age. Long before the open-source mantra became the darling of media and big-business Dee Hock founded Visa International, a great example of how "open-source" organizations can be formed for a greater good. This is and was an organization founded on the principles that each of its 22,000 members had the right to collaborate and contribute to Visa (monetary, infrastructure, operating philosophy, etc.) while at the same time competing intensely with each-other in the marketplace. His philosophy, as outlined in this book, clearly details why nearly each public and private institution today (command and control structures from the industrial revolution - read "closed-source) is inherrently sick and why chaordic (read open-source) organizations are the answer to the many societal and environmental ills plaguing our world. Chaordic organizations best reflect the models for organized behavior exhibited in nature.

    This is a truly visionary document that takes the open-source message beyond software and technology and applies it to the world around us.

  • Don't forget that this isn't news however - it's something different.

    I agree that slashdot has for a long while been rather biased towards linux + open source stuff (although that does seem to reflect the main portion of the slashdot readers). But this is not news, it's a really nice thing of Andover.net to give to the Open Source community (which, if you look at the sites they own, seem to be their main target market).

    It makes sense that Andover.net choose to give these awards mainly for open-source achievements - they are, after all a business and do have a target market.

  • ...I can't find any information on this person

    Slashdot throwing money around? Remember back when Malda was a poor college kid? My how thing have changed.

    --Lenny
  • Wouldn't best dressed be best awarded by a gift certificate to CopyLeft? Perhaps a retroactive one?

  • Unsung Hero (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Unsung Hero - Donald Becker. This guy is the lone wolf of the /usr/src/linux/net/* tree. I mean you can't swing a dead cat around linux networking documentation without hitting his name. Not to mention I see his name damn near every time my machine machine's boots (network driver credits).
  • it has been obvious for a long time, that when the writers on slashdot think opensource, they are actually just thinking linux. and this is why i have been reading slashdot less and less, and will certinaly not be wasting my time voting on these stupid categorys.

    where is the support for the tiny, just starting out, os's? why do the writers for slasdot still keep disilusioning themselves that linux is best for EVERYTHING, when it clearly is not? (infact, nothing is)
  • 1.For Incompetence above and beyond call of normal yellow journalism. 2.For piss poor trade show with almost no new technology (Networld+Interop 99 )both Atlanta and Las Vegas,do yourself a favor sell the shows to IDG , Linux world is better. 3.For 24x7 Fud on Zdtv. I nominate Ziff Davis. The multi function fud media masters. p.s ZD should have left Softbank alone
  • I'm pretty sure she was the main female on Monty Python; see her Everything [slashdot.org] entry. You can also see her filmography at IMDB [imdb.com].
  • Carol Cleveland was the girl who was part of the Monty Python troupe. According to the bio from the Flying Circus card set (hey, if I wasn't a geek, I wouldn't be here!!!)

    Carol was born in London but moved to America at age five. She was schooled in Texas and California before returning to England in 1960 to study at R.A.D.A. Her early tv credits include The Saint, The Avengers, Man in a Suitcase, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) and the comidies Doctors at Large, Father Dear Father and The Two Ronnies.
    Aside from her appearances in the Monty Python's Flying Circus series for BBC, she has been featured in all the Python films, stage shows and record albums, becoming known as The Python Girl
    More recently she has been seen in Are You Being Served? and Only Fools and Horses. She has done much stage work, covering a wide variety of comedy drama and pantomimes. She has also written and performed her own one-woman show entitled Carol Cleveland Reveals All, an autobiographical and humorous look at the glamour business.

    and now you know the rest of the story ;-)

  • You can't code an open source project and expect a "bounty" to be paid when it's all said and done. Who gets the money when it's all said and done? Shall the self-proclaimed leader of the project count the number of lines of code actually used in the "final" product and distributed the money accordingly? It's just not feasible. If you were to give $30k to Apache (poor example perhaps) ... who the heck would get the money? Nobody really knows who did what exactly. There's no way to make everybody happy.

    Along with this competition model you run into another problem: forking! With a $30k prize a state developers will be quick to realize they if they fork off from the main branch and a team of 3 guys can pull it off before the other group finishes thier project they'll only have to divide the money up 3 ways.

    Don't get me wrong; it's a neat idea... but it just won't pan out in real life.

    Justin Buist
  • it has been obvious for a long time, that when the writers on slashdot think opensource, they are actually just thinking linux. and this is why i have been reading slashdot less and less
    That was very well said. Thank you. And while I can't *exactly* moderate it up, perhaps this will help. (And don't rag on me: I've never done this before. I think it's an important point.)
  • Should only take a couple hundred lines (less?) of perl to: (1) Create unique yahoo email account. (2) Create ./ account using this email account. (3) Fetch POP mail from yahoo and parse ./ password. (4) Logon to ./ and cast vote of choice (5) Goto (1) Perhaps these should be named "best script kiddie" award? Ken
  • 1. The nomination process is wide open so
    you are welcome to login and make your case for
    whoever your feel deserves the money more than
    the usual well-known projects. Imagine that you
    could actually post a persuasive argument to help
    an under-funded project which you depend on rather
    than standing on the sidelines and bitching that
    nobody does anything for open source developers.

    2. You have to be logged in to vote. I'm not sure
    about the internals but I'm sure this is because
    there is code under here that will specifically
    exclude any vote bots.

    3. Andover doesn't allow other Linux news sites to
    carry word of these awards??? What are you high?
    This was sent out as a press release today and is
    already announced on LinuxToday.

    So you're the type who doesn't vote because you
    feel democracy doesn't work, right? Nice attitude.
    Glad to have you in the community. I'm sure all
    the open source projects whose software you
    depend on really appreciate having you do nothing
    on their behalf. They ought to be thanking you.

  • To think about (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    One thing that crosses my mind when considering these awards are paying tribute to the coders/reverse engineers who have provided us with open source programs that allow us to use gadgets that are released with closed source Windows XX and Mac software only:

    So here goes:

    "The Snowblind Alliance" --
    The fine folks whom without I could not use Linux to transfer files to my portable MP3 software.

    "Anyone Involved with Video4Linux" --
    All the way from the Kernel modules right down to the application level programs (XawTV, Kwintv) we could give out 3 or 4 of these awards to the people who let me watch TV in Linux while I surf the Web....

    "Grip - Mike Olipant"
    Anyone who rips MP3's in Linux, knows that this GTK based app is as good as they come in any operating system.

    "CDRecord - Joerg Schilling"
    Without this valuable tool, that $250.00 CD-RW player/recorder you just bought would be about as good and useful in Linux as that first 1 or 2 speed CD Drive you payed the same $250.00 for 10 years ago.

    "Sane - David Mosberger-Tang "
    It's really nice to be able to scan with Linux rather than have to maintain a dual boot...

    "PHP - The PHP team "
    The open source hammer that ensures we do not have to use inferior operating systems to provide easy access to corporate data stores or build dynamic web pages....(Perl is good...but is not quite as easy as PHP)

    "Any Linux propaganda or news reporting award on the list should go to Joe Barr and Nicholas Petreley at Linux world....They do a great job in covering the items the rest of us can't find the words to describe...."


    The above items (and many others I did not list) are crucial to widespread desktop acceptance of Linux. I did not list many server related items because I believe that any *nix has always been the logical choice for server realted tasks anyway...So in my mind the market is already won.

    IMHO
  • Free Software as a whole owes a lot to IBM and Microsoft. It's apparently hard to develop linux for the Mac because Apple doesn't open their hardware specs. I hear that LinuxPPC doesn't run on the newest Apples because of this.

    The IBM-Microsoft relationship of the 80's has created a good environment for free software folks to work by decentralizing things. The IBM-compatible platform has given us an open standard to use. Lots of people make cheap IBM compatible hardware, and anyone with the expertise to do so can write software to run on that hardware. If either IBM or Microsoft made both PC hardware and PC operating systems, things would be much more difficult.

    If I've been unfair to Apple, let me know. It would be interesting to see how Apple and LinuxPPC get along.



  • Sure, projects like KDE/Gnome (no flamewar please) or Mozilla are important, but they are sponsored enough by other sources, we don't need to support them that badly.
    What is needed more IMHO is support for all those small coders who use a few weeks of their spare-time to write useful utilities for free (the type of software which would be distributed as 20$ shareware under Windows).

    So why not create a foundation?
    If the money was invested with a 10% interest, we would have roughly 5000$ dollars per half year available.
    We could then have a /. poll every six months giving out five 1000$ prizes...

  • traitor (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You're giving the rest of us non-US people a bad name (Hi! Canadian here!)

    You're not a Canadian, you're either an American pretending to be Canadian, or a fucking traitor to your own flag!

  • I agree. I think it'd be better to have a poll of the slashdot community to vote on what new projects we'd like to see. Then for the top (say 5) projects, put up bounties on those two software bazaar sites. Give it a month or so for people to write up their proposals, and let them get coding.

  • screen rocks... specially for IRC... though BitchX has it's own screen manager built in :)
  • Clue Stick Award for FUD in Journalism = MSNBC

    My vote goes to Ziff Davis :-)

    --
    grappler
  • I couldn't believe it when I saw a full page add in Linux Magazine for slashdot an now this!

    I still like slashdot and will visit almost daily but I don't see things staying the same.

    Maybee things will get better after slashdot goes through it "Mall Rats" phase.

  • Re:you know, I don't really like this idea (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Obviously, this is simply a lame publicity stunt. If the really wanted to contribute they could simply donate it to the GNU folks or the EFF.

    No, this is all about seeing who will kiss their ass, and how much, in hopes of getting a slice of the pie.

    Currently, andover.net has a lot of money, and they want to use it in the traditionaly way - to wield power.

    Just more fragmentation in Linux as more and more $$ enter the picture.

    Not a big shock.

    &sign($AC[0]);

  • What's the point of retroactively awarding people? Why not use the money as an incentive to coders, like a contest?

    I don't understand your point. Rewarding what people have done is clearly an incentive to be, in the future, one of the have-dones. I don't think most coders or advocates are so short-sighted that they cannot recognize the cause and effect going on between valuable contributions to the Open Source community and rewards given to the contributors by the community.

    Especially since there are glaring problems in the categories. The first issue is the ones where I can already pick the final winner.

    Big Dumb Patent Bully == Amazon
    Big Dumb Domain Bully == etoys
    Clue Stick Award for FUD in Journalism = MSNBC

    The rewards in those catagories are a beanie and a hug from Cowboy Neal. I guess they forgot to label that part It's Funny, Laugh . However, I don't really see how including an obvious joke, that's relevant to the topic, would discredit the rest of the awards.

    Then there's the ones where 90% of the voters will go "Huh??". Like:

    Best Perl Module
    Most Improved Kernel Module
    Best Newbie Helper

    Certainly, not everybody is a kernel hacker. Not everybody is a perl hacker. Not everybody is a newbie. But that does not mean these people do not make valuabe contributions. After all, where would Linux be, without that kernel? And if not everybody feels qualified to vote on every category, that's okay. After all, these awards are to reward contributions, not to entertain the voters.

  • Safeway just began a $1,000,000 giveaway. Should all the employees get a salary of at least that?

    and don't worry about Malda, at this point I'm sure $100,000 is pure peanuts to him.

  • "Looks like the folks at WorldForge want some of the golden nuggets the emporer might leave behind."

    I can't stand this sort of reply. I posted that comment with no intentions other than voicing my opinion, and instantly I get alleged of writing this comment to, as you so put it, "kiss ass" for WorldForge at Andover.net.

    Sure, it would be cool if WorldForge got this prize, but I don't believe it will, mainly due to the tiny amount of people that are actually familiar with the project.

    I spend a lot of my time coding for WorldForge and put a lot of effort in the project, but I do have a life outside WorldForge. Just because it's in my signature, doesn't mean every single comment I post here is related to WorldForge.

  • Re:Open Source - Schmopen Source (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "I can't stand this sort of reply. I posted that comment with no intentions other than voicing my opinion, and instantly I get alleged of writing this comment to, as you so put it, "kiss ass" for WorldForge at Andover.net."

    Ok, I believe you - but the point has a lot more to do with /. than you personally anyway.

    So I'll officially apologize to ya, your the only one who wasn't looking for money :)

    Besides, I'll nominate you - your as good a candidate as any! :)

    &sign($AC[0]);
  • Half the awards look like they're going to be given out to people who are heavily sponsored by corporations already.
    Spend some more money on people who make games for no finacial reward.
  • Some innovative projects going on for Linux:

    • I have to include ReiserFS. It's a novel way of approaching the filesystem philosophy, and it works very well.
    • The Free Film Project - whilst some of the components exist already, there hasn't been any co-ordinated effort to produce drama on this kind of scale in an Open Source environment.
    • EvStack and GGI deserve an honorable mention for innovation.
    • ExoPC warrants some mention as an innovative Open Source OS. It's a whole new approach to OS design, taking the microkernel concept to the point where there are actual significant gains.
  • Actually, I voted with you on this one. Natalie Portman *is* deserving of the Best Dressed award. The television news journals as well as the print media were incredibly obsessed with the style of clothing she wore in Star Wars. It was the geek fashion event of 1999, if there ever was one.
  • I want to be an upstanding, responsible member of the Slashdot community. Could someone please explain to me why that post has been deemed Flamebait, instead of being recognized as a joke that apparently didn't come off, so that I may avoid committing such heinous errors in the future?
  • I don't know why I bother to reply to trolls, but I will anyway.

    (* Sigh! *)

    Exokernels are =NOT THE SAME= as Microkernels, although they borrow from the same basic idea. They take it to new heights, though, putting -everything- but the kitchen sink in User Space, rather than Kernel Space.

    This gives you the same benefits of Microkernels, but without the drawback. By having only an absolute minimum in Kernel Space, you don't have the context switching overhead that Microkernels had, which slowed them down. Instead, you only dive into kernel space when absolutely necessary. The practical upshot is that you get even fewer context switches than you do in a monolithic kernel, so you're not wasting as much time on such trivia.

    In the benchtest on their website, ExoPC was shown to be nearly 1,000 times faster than FreeBSD at basic network operations. That's not a bad speed improvement, given FreeBSD is hardly a laggard.

  • Why would "Best kernel module" only refer to the "Best linux kernel module" anyways? Slashdot doesnt support just Linux. I would say "Best kernel module" means just what it says, and can include modules for the linux kernel.
  • Well, if that's what's you think then you can fuck off, because I seem to remember a couple of wars about 55 and 85 years ago, oh yeah and that whole Korean conflict. All three of those wars we came to many country's rescue/aid (can you say Marshall Plan), and fought along side you (or against depends on where your from) to stop those cock sucking fascists(sp) from taking over the world. Do you like Nazi's, well jackass, do you think was responsible for turning the tide of WWII, England could have only held out against them for so much longer (this is no knock against England because they fought damn fine battle I might add at the Battle of Britain).

    So I don't want to hear this turn your back on us crap. The US will come to the rescue of just about any country in the world, and don't try to say they wouldn't, they've done it before, and they'll do it again. The way I look at it we have saved this world twice this century, you like the freedom's you have (especially if you live anywhere in Europe) be glad we whooped Germany (twice) and Japan's asses. Even the people in those countries are better of now than they would have been had they won (What the hell is up with your last sentence, it makes absolutely no sense, you are a collection of our people.

    Well, no shit every country is a collection of (insert country emigrated from here) people, 99% of the people on this planet emigrated from somewhere else, whether it was 1 year ago or 100,000 years ago, everywhere except the area around Ethiopia, where the modern human evolved from. But that's a totally different discussion.

    Where exactly are you from? If it is anywhere in the Western Hemisphere you had to have come from somewhere else, and yes the native Americans came from Asia from 40,000 to 12,000 years ago. But what defines when a person is no longer an immigrant and a native born person, I was always under the impression it was the first generation of children born in the country. And then you say that this country is composed of traitors, how exactly do you figure that, when the vast majority of the people in the country emigrate here for more opportunities and better standards of living You anti-American people piss me off to no end, you bitch about how we are not really as good as we claim we are, you say our educational system sucks ass, our murder rate it too high (no argument here), we are arrogant pricks, we have a fucked up president (again no argument here), we have a cowardly army, etc.

    Does everyone from other countries want to know why our educational systems score so low in comparison to other countries, it is because, now I don't know for sure if this is true for all countries but I know some for some of the countries it is true, Canada, Japan, China, France, maybe England, Russia, Australia, etc. All of these countries test their entire population of students and only select the best students and use their test score; they don't sample from the entire population. Argue with me if you want but I have read in the past that these countries do modify the scores. We don't, we use very last dumbass in figuring out our average test score.

    Yes some of us are arrogant pricks, and I am no exception to this rule, I can get very nationalistic at times, like now. But so can most other person in the world.

    This whole idea about us having a cowardly army is just ludicrous, you complain that we are too scared to fight you, so we use stealth technology and laser guided bombs and other technologies. Well you know what that sounds like, pure and simple envy. We have the best technology and you are pissed because you don't have it, or don't have enough money to develop it. It is not cowardice, it is intelligence, why send troops into a hostile area to take down a radar station when you can just launch a missile at it from 10 miles away. General Patton, I think, once said "no man ever won a war by dying for his country", I hope you can figure that one out for yourself, otherwise read the previous sentence.

    In conclusion you ended your statement by saying that our people turned our backs on you, well I would have to say there is probably a good reason for that, I wonder what it could be, a little word that begins with FREE and ends in DOM, put it together and what's that spell, NOT YOU.

    PS: That little part above doesn't pertain to places canada, australia, and western europe(at least today).

  • <!-- Insert Sarcasm Here -->

    That's right. We should never celebrate the hard work of anyone in the open source community because someone might get left out.

    <!-- End Sarcasm -->

    The open source community needs events and celebrations just as much as any other community. Recognition is just about the only thing most of us hope to get out of our hard work and time spent. (Oh yeah... and better software)

  • Slarty's First Law:
    Most Slashdot Moderators are Morons.

    ... and even those who aren't tend to be rather stupid when given moderator points. This is the Linux community, after all.

    'nuff said.

    Slarty

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