Drum Roll... The winners of the 2007 Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards
are...
By Zaheda
Bhorat, Open Source ProgramsLast night, July 24, at the
Open Source Conference in Portland the winners of the coveted Google-O'Reilly Open Source
Award were announced.
Following in the footsteps of past key
contributors and open source visionaries, the five winners for 2007 are :
Karl Fogel - Best
Community Builder There's a common saying that open source isn't so much
about the code itself, but about the communities that thrive around it. And Karl has become an
oracle when it comes to the management of open source communities. As the founder and leader
of the Subversion project, the harmony within the Subversion community has been attributed to
Karl, because of his consistent leadership and maintenance of the culture-of-respect. This and
his transfer of wisdom on community management into a book ("Producing Open Source Software",
O'Reilly Media, also at
producingoss.com) makes Karl our 2007 Best
Community Builder.
Pamela
Jones - Best FUD FighterWhen the SCO drama was being played
out, one website became the place to get your knowledge. Pamela, or PJ, as she is known, leads
research and reporting of legal events important to the FOSS community. Through her tremendous
work,
Groklaw continues to
be the place to get our regular dose of legal insight and analysis.
Aaron Leventhal - Best
Accessibility ArchitectAaron Leventhal is a long-time supporter of
accessibility efforts. Earlier in his career he worked on a Braille publishing system used by
teachers, publishers and individual Braille readers. He later joined Netscape as accessibility
architect for Mozilla development, and has been involved with the
Mozilla project almost since its
beginnings. Aaron has single-handedly succeeded in turning Firefox from being an also-ran in
web accessibility to being the preferred accessibility solution going forward.
David Recordon - Best StrategistOpenID has gone
from hack to Internet staple in an incredibly short period of time. Dave Recordon has turned
OpenID into a viable alternative to non-open identity systems. He has taken on many
organizations and made real headway towards pushing Identity into the open source space. This
guy knows challenging, and he's met and conquered every challenge. For that reason David is
this year's Best Strategist for his work on OpenID. All this, and he's not yet old enough to
buy alcohol in the US.
Paul Vixie - Outstanding Lifetime
ContributionsFor decades Paul been one of the key players in the Domain
Name System. He wrote and still maintains BIND, the nameserver most of the Internet uses. He's
co-founded MAPS, a non-profit that fights spam. He's the operator of the F root server and he
also holds the record for the most CERT security advisories. For his many contributions
significant to the existence of the Internet, the "Outstanding Lifetime Contributions" winner
is Paul Vixie.
Check here for
OSCON pictures
and
blog
posts from OSCON and the Open Source Awards event.
We would
like to thank The Google and O'Reilly Open Source Awards
Committee members and especially to each of you who participated in our
first open nomination process for this award.
Until next year, please
join us in congratulating each of our worthy winners for 2007.
