And the winners of the 2008 Sourceforge Community Choice Awards are...
The Sourceforge Community Choice Awards were announced tonight at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, with few surprises.
Well, I suppose the biggest surprise is that people stubbornly vote for the same projects each year, even when they fail to live up to their billing, or have already surpassed their category. I noted before that there were some curious finalists. The winners? Curiouser and curiouser.
- Best Project: OpenOffice.org
- Best Project for the Enterprise: OpenOffice.org
- Best Project for Education: OpenOffice.org
- Most Likely to Be the Next $1B Acquisition: phpMyAdmin
- Best Project for Multimedia: VLC
- Best Project for Gamers: XBMC
- Most Likely to Change the World: Linux
- Best New Project: Magento
- Most Likely to Be Accused of Patent Violation: WINE
- Most Likely to Get Users Sued: eMule
- Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins: phpMyAdmin
- Best Tool or Utility for Developers: Notepad++
I can't understand some of these. phpMyAdmin is a project, not a corporation. It cannot be purchased for $1 billion or even $1. Why vote for it in a category in which it doesn't apply?
Also, I like and use OpenOffice, but Best Project? I voted for Drupal. OpenOffice has had years to demonstrate that it's a serious contender, but it has yet to displace Microsoft. Mozilla's Firefox or Yahoo!'s Zimbra would be better contenders, in my view, than OpenOffice has proved to be. And OpenOffice as Best Project for the Enterprise? Well, perhaps, but not until enterprises actually start using it in any significant quantity. Today, lots of individuals do, but few enterprises in any systematic fashion.
As for Linux, well, hasn't it already changed the world?
Regardless of my quibbles, these are excellent projects. I encourage you to take a look at them and, even better, download and use them.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
