Community

Award Categories

Best Project

Let's start with the big one. The Best Project award goes to the project with the best technical design, most helpful community, and most powerful product.

Last year's winner: 7-Zip

Best Project for the Enterprise

The penetration of open source in the enterprise is hardly news. The winner of Best Project for the Enterprise solves the problems that keep you from providing superior value to your customers or users...not to mention the immense profitability your investors are asking you for.

Last year's winner: Firebird

Sponsored by:

Best Project for Educators

Whether you're working in grade school education, high school, or college, teaching is difficult. Open source can help! This award goes to the project that makes it easier to educate and share knowledge together.

Sponsored by:

Most Likely to Be the Next $1B Acquisition

If we've all proven nothing else in the past twelve months, we've proven that your open source company can be so successful that someone is willing to give you bags and bags of money for it. The winner of this award is a project that is next in line to receive those bags.

Best Project for Multimedia

The winner of this award is the project that lets you do something really cool with your audio or video data.

Last year's winner: Audacity

Best Project for Gamers

You could be trading in hours and hours of precious sleep for additional productivity, but you're probably playing games instead. Which project makes you sleep more deeply at your desk tomorrow morning?

Last year's winner: ScummVM

Most Likely to Change the World

The winner of this award is a project that can change society for the better.

Sponsored by:

Best New Project

All projects were once new projects. Of all the projects that started in the past year, which one has had the most success? Which one has the greatest potential? The winning project in this category has just been born, but is sure to make a difference in the years to come.

Last year's winner: eMule (which wasn't really "new") and Launchy (which was).

Sponsored by:

Most Likely to Be Ambiguously and Baselessly Accused of Patent Violation

As an innovator these days, it's important to do something revolutionary - but not so revolutionary that someone else speculatively patented it fifteen years ago. The winners of this project are so forward-looking with their technical vision that they're sure to get pounced on by patent trolls from the early nineties for implementing an idea they saw on Star Trek in the sixties.

Most Likely to Get Users Sued by Anachronistic Industry Associations Defending Dead Business Models

These are dark and dangerous times for hackers and users alike! The winner of this award is a project that provides freedom to those who use it - more freedom, in fact, than "the man" approves of.

Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins

The project that wins this award keeps your systems running while you sleep peacefully through the night with your pager under your pillow.

Last year's winner: phpMyAdmin

Sponsored by:

Best Tool or Utility for Developers

The Best Tool or Utility for Developers is a project that makes the most of your precious coding time or allows you to do things you wouldn't otherwise be able to do.

Last year's winner: TortoiseSVN