By Uli Bantle
Every year since 2000, Linux New Media (found at http://www.linuxnewmedia.com) has asked the members of an international jury to dish out honors for outstanding achievement in the broad field of free software. The jury comprises personalities from the Open Source movement, authors, journalists, government offices, and representatives of industry. Every year, new award categories reflect new trends. This year sees new awards for virtualization and anti-spam solutions.
In the new "Best Combination of Community and Commerce" category, Ubuntu and Mark Shuttleworth's Canonical won for achieving a balancing act between community-based development and commercial enterprise. Trolltech and KDE were close runners-up. Combinations of Novell/openSuse and Red Hat/Fedora were clear losers.
Many observers expected Xen and VMware to play a leading role in the virtualization stakes. In terms of market share, VMware is the king of the hill, but Xen has achieved much popularity thanks to integration with some well-known Linux distributions. The fact that third place went to the LGPL-licensed Qemu emulator was a surprise. Although the gap to the second-placed product was clear, Qemu did outpace OpenVZ, LinuxVserver Parallels, and User Mode Linux.
IBM is turning out to be a serial winner in the Linux-friendly hardware category. This is the second time in successive years that Big Blue has scored full marks in this category. The runners up were CPU manufacturers AMD and Intel. This year is the first time that the global chip vendor, Intel, has made it onto the podium, ousting last year's third placed contender, HP.
More dilligence in both CPU vendors' efforts to cooperate with Open Source developers is obviously a key factor in their recent success. Among other things, Intel has recently published 3D drivers for its PCI Express chipsets (see http://intellinuxgraphics.org).
Ubuntu has also become a kind of heavyweight at the Awards. The jury agreed that "Linux for Human Beings" was by far the most user-friendly Linux distribution, with Kubuntu, the KDE-enabled derivative, following in the second spot. Their closest rival was the Novell-backed openSuse project. The jury also took Freespire into consideration; based on the commercial Linspire distribution, the free Freespire derivative was released just this year.
Live CDs serve a vital role for testing and troubleshooting. Klaus Knopper is generally regarded as the inventor of the live distribution, and Klaus' committment and service to Linux were more than enough to convince the jury to hand him the special award for "Outstanding Contribution to Linux / Open Source / Free software." Wikipedia patron and mentor, Jimmy Wales, took second place behind Klaus. Third place was shared by two institutions: the Mozilla Foundation, and the OASIS consortium, http://www.oasis-open.org/home/index.php, which is responsible for the Open Document Standard. This can be seen as a move by the jury to honor what many regard to be the major topic in 2006, the fight for a free document standard. Of course, the Mozilla Foundation released Firefox 2.0 in the run up to the awards. Two million downloads in the first 24 hours are ample proof of the outstanding success the foundation's products enjoy.
