Delighted to take home a Linux New Media Award 2012 (from left to right): Florian Effenberger (Libre Office), Andreas Kretschmer (PostgreSQL Europe), Christine Hupe (Google), Julia Oppel and Soung-min Choi (Samsung), and Thorsten Behrens (Libre Office).

The publishing company behind Linux Magazine makes these awards every year; the jury comprises members of the magazine editorial teams and about 300 members of the International open source community.

There were about 40 candidates in the prize for the most innovative open source project this year. When the polls closed, most of the votes finally went to Android, Google's Linux-based mobile operating system. This has given Linux an enormous boost in popularity, as Knoppix inventor, Klaus Knopper, emphasized in his preliminary speech. He handed over the award to Product Marketing Manager, Christine Hupe from Google. In her thank you speech she praised the large community of app developers who provide software for the platform. Christine was asked back to the stage when android later on received the prize for outstanding services to Linux and free software. It was handed over this year by long-standing Linux advocate Jon "Maddog"' Hall. Maddog stated that only Android gave consumers freedom of choice between various mobile devices and providers.

The "Hottest Linux Device 2012" also has something to do with Android: this was the Smartphone Galaxy Nexus by Samsung, which asserted itself against devices such as Amazon's Kindle and a large field of other Android phones. In his laudation, Marcel Hilzinger, the Editor in Chief of Android User, also admitted that the Galaxy Nexus was his personal favorite. Korea-based Samsung also received the award as the most Android-friendly hardware manufacturer.

The other big winner on the day was the free office suite, Libre Office. The project, which started life as an Open Office fork in 2010, has managed to establish itself as the quasi standard on the free desktop, while at the same time running on Windows and Mac OS X. This helped it to come out on top of competitors such as Samba and Wine as the best interoperability solution. In his preliminary speech, Linux consultant Thomas Uhl said that this category was particularly important, because every user composed text and office documents. The prize was accepted by Thorsten Behrens from the Document Foundation which backs the Libre Office project. He dedicated the prize to all the contributors from the community. Thomas Uhl said he was really looking forward to the web and mobile versions of the office suite. And the free office program also seems to won the hearts of the users, as it also won the public choice award prize for the best desktop application.

In addition to this, Linux New Media also awarded a prize for the best open source database. PostgreSQL won in this category with a virtually unparalleled lead. The winner received one and a half times as many votes as the second placed database.