2009 Linux New Media Awards

CeBIT Open Source took place in Hanover, Germany, this year and was the perfect backdrop for the Linux New Media Awards (Figure 1). The awards ceremony took place on March 5th, with winners and presenters gathering at the Open Source Forum in Hall 6 for the official ceremony and the ensuing party.

Figure 1: The Linux New Media Awards 2009 winners. Left to right: Dirk-Lüder Kreie and Michael Buege (OpenStreetMap), Martin von Löwis (Python), Markus Friedl (OpenSSH), Dan Kegel (Google, for Android), and Thomas Kaminsky (Intel).

An international jury of some 200 experts from the community, industry, and government nominated candidates for this year's six categories of the Linux New Media Awards and voted on the winners (see "The Jury 2009" box). The field nominated by the jury was huge. The Outstanding Contributions to Open Source category alone had more than 30 people and projects on the ballot, starting with Debian and its Project Leader Steve McIntyre, through SUSE Build Service, to the Vietnamese government for its Open Source plans.

OpenStreetMap received the award in the Most Innovative Open Source Project category. Michael Buege and Dirk-Lüder Kreie accepted the prize on behalf of the project and praised the commitment of the 100,000 or so people who contributed to the free GIS. OpenStreetMap's second award was in the Outstanding Contribution to Linux and Open Source category. This category, sponsored by Linux New Media AG, the publisher of Linux Magazine, is a standing feature at the Awards, whereas other categories reflect current topics.

The award for the most Open Source-friendly hardware vendor went to Intel; other nominees were Asus, IBM, and Sun. Peter Ganten (Linux Association) handed over the award and praised Intel for its contributions to kernel development and its commitment to open standards. Ganten reminded the audience that Linus Torvalds wrote the first kernel for Intel's i386 CPU.

Oliver Zendel from Germany's Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) handed over the award in the Security category. The award went to OpenSSH; Markus Friedl, a core member of the OpenSSH team, accepted the award and thanked the user community for their support.

The Mobility category reflects a current trend in Linux. Professor Jean-Pierre Seifert (Technical University Berlin) handed over the award to Dan Kegel for Google's Linux-based mobile platform, Android.

Knoppix inventor and Linux Magazine columnist Klaus Knopper presented the award for best Open Source programming language, a subject that saw heated discussions among jury members. The award finally went to Python. Martin von Löwis of the Python Foundation accepted the award on behalf of the Python community.