• E-mail this page
• |  Print this page
• | 
• | 
• | 

SourceForge Says: Pick Your Favorites!

Most of us don't get to vote on the Oscars. But most anyone can get into the action with SourceForge's Community Choice Awards, where your votes choose which open source projects stand out in their respective fields.

The categories have undergone a bit of shuffling since last time. Here's how they break down this time around:

• Best Project -- "the best open source application in the world -- enough said". My vote goes for Firefox, since it's the one I've gotten the most use out of, bar none.
• Best Project for the Enterprise -- A distro, probably Red Hat or SUSE; the former for clouds/virt/server goodies and the latter for integration with domains.
• Best Project for Gamers
• Best Project for Multimedia -- VLC, hands down. Too useful; I can't count the number of times someone's sent me some broken video file which would only play in VLC.
• Best New Project
• Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins
• Best Tool or Utility for Developers
• Best Commercial Open Source Project -- Here's one that I'll be following closely after the winner is announced. The roster of nominees could be surprising.
• Best Project for Academia -- My choices are either R or Moodle, although I admit I don't have the breadth of experience in this area that I should.
• Best Project for Government
• Most Likely to Change the Way You Do Everything -- An open-ended category into which a whole slew of things can be dropped. I fear Twitter will wind up being one of the major noms here (even if it isn't really an open source project, etc.).
• Best Visual Design -- Now here's a category a lot of open-source mavens might snort at, but I take it a good deal seriously. Interface design says a great deal about the general level of professionalism in a project; it's not just "eye candy".

Nominations close May 29th. Don't let your favorite project go unrecognized!

InformationWeek Analytics has published an independent analysis of the current state of open source adoption. Download the report here (registration required).

Follow me and the rest of InformationWeek on Twitter.

« DAS VS. SAN - Capacity And Performance Management | Main | Can Startups Survive Recession Without VC Money? »