Community Spirit

Figure 1: Open Source icon Jon “maddog” Hall gives the prize for Outstanding Contribution to Knoppix creator Klaus Knopper, and Eva Brucherseifer of KDE presents the Community and Commerce award to Canonical / Ubuntu.

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.

Bridging the Gap

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.

Heavyweights

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.

Specialists

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.

Linux New Media Awards 2006
Most Linux-friendly Hardware Vendor
1. IBM	23.0 %
2. AMD	17.0 %
3. Intel	14.0 %
Best Virtualization Solution
1. Xen	38.0 %
2. VMware	35.0 %
3. Qemu	10.0 %
Best Linux-based Anti-spam Solution
1. SpamAssassin	69.0 %
2. Bogo Filter	11.0 %
3. Kaspersky AntiSpam	8.0 %
Most User-friendly Linux Distribution
1. Ubuntu	27.0 %
2. Kubuntu	13.0 %
3. openSuse	11.0 %
Best Combination of Community and Commerce
1. Canonical /Ubuntu	21.0 %
2. Trolltech / KDE	17.0 %
3. MySQL / MySQL Community Edition	13.0 %
Outstanding Contribution to Linux /
Open Source / Free Software
1. Klaus Knopper	12.0 %
2. Jimmy Wales	10.0 %
3. Mozilla Foundation	9.0 %
3. OASIS (ODF)	9.0 %

The Jury

For truly inspired results, you need experienced jury members – and the best place to find them is wherever Linux and Open Source products are in use. The jury for this year's Linux New Media Awards included experts from all parts of the Linux community. In cooperation with the editorial staff of Linux Magazine and the eight other non-English mags published by Linux New Media AG, around 200 people from all walks of Linux life cast their votes this year. In a two-stage voting process, the jurors chose Linux products, people, and organizations that deserve special notice for innovation and originality over the past twelve months. The jury included: Alan Cox is a long-standing kernel hacker who has never been one to mince words. Alan works for Red Hat, lives in Wales, and keeps a diary in Welsh. J.D. Frazer, who is better known by the name of Illiad, is the creator of UserFriendly – see his monthly strip in Linux Magazine on page 17. Bdale Garbee works for Hewlett Packard Corporation, where he is developing a Linux distribution. Peter Gutmann is a researcher at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, working on the design and analysis of cryptographic security architectures. Patricia Jung is the inventor and usually invisible hand behind Linux Magazine's Linux World News. In her day job she works as sysadmin and editor at opensourcepress.de. Jon “maddog” Hall preaches for the free OS all over the world. He is the Executive Director of Linux International and one of the community's most outspoken voices. Yuwei Lin researches the social, cultural and economic aspects of Free Software at the University of Manchester. Frederick Noronha is an Indian journalist, based in Goa, and co-founder of BytesForAll. He writes extensively on all FLOSS related topics, covering both India and Asia. Dmitri Popov is a linguist and full-time freelance writer. He writes exclusively about Open Source software; his articles have appeared in various computer publications. As a developer of the gnuLinEx distribution, Dario Rapisardi is involved in the massive Linux migration in the public administration of the Spanish region of Extremadura. Blake Ross is a 21 year-old software engineer best known for cofounding the Firefox project. Damien Sandras is the creator and developer of the Ekiga VoIP and video conferencing software. Apart from this, he is part of the FOSDEM core team. Franz Schmid knows the Postscript and PDF formats by heart, which only makes sense, since he is the developer behind the free Scribus DTP program. Tom Schwaller was one of the founding fathers of Linux Magazine and the first Editor in Chief of the German language edition. Tom now works as a Linux IT architect for IBM. Rafael Peregrino da Silva holds a Master Degree in Electrical Engineering and was guest professor at the Technical University Berlin, Germany. Today he is Editorial Director of Linux Magazine Brasil. Artur Skura, a long-time activist in Linux and Free Software community, is the Editor in Chief of the Polish language edition of Linux Magazine. Pia Waugh is the Vice President of Linux Australia. She is passionate about FLOSS, and she works closely with Australian Government agencies and businesses. Warren Woodford has been working on the bleeding edge of technology for over 40 years. His most recent contribution to the Open Source community is the popular MEPIS Linux distribution.