SourceForge announced the winners of its second annual SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards in Portland, OR, at an evening celebration held during the OSCON conference. The awards recognize open source projects that have the most supportive community following, and those that the community’s members believe are built with the highest quality, productivity and ingenuity. For the non-traditional awards ceremony, SourceForge hosted a free party at the Jupiter Hotel in downtown Portland that was open to all members of the SourceForge.net community, media and OSCON attendees, and was heavily attended with over 400 people present.
Winners were chosen in 11 categories, including two new categories for 2007: Technical Support and Collaboration. Among the many winners, two projects won twice; 7-Zip for Best Project and Best Technical Design; Firebird for Best Project for the Enterprise and Best User Support. Instead of a standard awards ceremony, the party celebrated each winning project in a distinct and unique way. For three projects, a donation was made in the name of the winning project to a charity of their choice. For another project, the crowd was supplied with a special drink entitled “The Bar Coder” to toast the winner in style.
"It was a super cool evening. The finalists and winners were directly selected by the community, which is the very best way to do it, if you ask me," said Ross Turk, SourceForge.net Community Manager. "But frankly, I didn’t think there were any losers tonight. Greater awareness of what’s being built and what’s possible just help strengthen open source, and the winners represent a standard that up-and-coming innovators should strive to achieve."
The second annual SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards built on the resounding community interest and success of the inaugural awards. This year, the voting process incorporated community feedback from 2006 aimed at easier categorization and simplified voting. In keeping with the spirit of SourceForge.net, the voting was open to anyone in the community and winners were decided solely by the community. This flat, democratic approach distinguishes the SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards and places the emphasis where it should be - on the community of users.
List of 2007 categories and finalists:
Best Project: 7-Zip
Best New Project: eMule and Launchy
Best Tool or Utility for Developers: TortoiseSVN
Best Project for the Enterprise: Firebird
Best Project for Gamers: ScummVM
Best Project for Multimedia: Audacity
Best Project for Communications: phpBB
Best User Support: Firebird
Best Technical Design: 7-Zip
Most Collaborative Project: Azureus
Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins: phpMyAdmin
For more information, visit www.sourceforge.com