Charles-H Schulz writes on his private blog:
Yesterday I was honored to receive the “Lutèce d’Or” trophy on behalf of the OpenOffice.org Project from the hands of Mr Besson, Minister of the Prospective and Digital Technologies of the French Republic. There was a standing ovation, but this one was not so much dedicated to my humble person than it was to the OpenOffice.org project and its members.
On 7 December 2007, Sun Microsystems Inc. announced a new million-dollar fund to foster innovation in six of the open-source projects it sponsors and contributes to http://www.sun.com/software/opensource/awards/index.jsp . We are pleased to report that OpenOffice.org was included. The contest, which we have titled the OpenOffice.org Community Innovation Program, commences tomorrow, 30 January, and we invite OpenOffice.org Community members to participate.
What do you have to do to enter?
To win a prize?
Our rules, which will be posted later on today and linked to the OpenOffice.org homepage (www.openoffice.org), explain these and many other details, and you must read them carefully.
What are we looking for? In general terms, we are looking for superlative work that is useful to the Community; work that is challenging, that is non-trivial, and that furthers the Community as much as the software. You can enter alone or in a team; and if you are eligible, you could win a lot of money. But we explain all this in the rules, the link to which you will be able to find on the OpenOffice.org homepage.
Note: The Program ends 23 June 2008 and begins 30 January 2008.
OpenOffice.org
The goal of the OpenOffice.org Community Innovation Award Program is to foster community development and innovation. All projects must be able to be subsequently worked on by the community and all work must be abide by OpenOffice.org's license scheme. There are six categories for this program: Technical, Community, Tools, OpenDocument Format (ODF), Documentation and Special. The OpenOffice.org Community Council is the final judge of the program and coordination of the judging will be done by a committee made up of some of its members. The Community Awards Program Committee includes: Louis Suárez-Potts (Sun), Pavel Janík (independent), John McCreesh (independent) and Stefan Taxhet (Sun). For program details: http://development.openoffice.org/community_innovation_program.html
Contests are fine. I might even participate myself. Its a fine way to get new contributers out of the bushes. The problem is, that a contest only takes what comes in the limited contest period. A lot of people are doing a big contribution every day. Both when a contest is running and between. What about that effort. Shouldn't that be rewarded as well ?
Sun Microsystems has announced that they will support the Sun driven open source projects with an amount of 1 million dollars.
http://www.sun.com/software/opensource/awards/index.jsp . Contest will be published within the individual projects soon. These projects are GlassFish, NetBeans, OpenJDK, OpenOffice.org, OpenSolaris and OpenSPARC.
You can find the announcement from Sun here: http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20071205005370&newsLang=en.
The contest for openOffice.org has not been published yet, bur further details is promised before the Christmas holidays. It'sinteresting to see what they will come up with this time.
I suggest that some of the money from Sun should be used to establish an international annual open source award. The award can be given to a person, organization or OS project that has contributed to open source in general or an individual project in particular.
I'm also thinking domestic. In Denmark we have had an annual event now for a decade, called LinuxForum. From 2008 the event has changed name to Open Source Days ( http://www.opensourcedays.org ) because the event isn't just Linux.
Why don't we establish a domestic open source award.
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