Congratulations to the Winners of the Google O'Reilly Open Source Awards

Yesterday evening, I was privileged to share a stage with OSCON Co-Chair, Allison Randal to present the 5th Annual Google O'Reilly Open Source Awards. We once again opened nominations to the Open Source world at large and we were pleased at the fantastic response we received from the community. From the hundreds of nominations we received, after much deliberation these five individuals were selected:

• Brian Aker, Best Open Source Database Hacker for his work on Drizzle and MySQL
• Bruce Momjian, Database Jedi Master for his work on PostgreSQL
• Clay Johnson, Best Community Builder for his work with Sunlight Labs
• Evan Prodromou, Best Social Networking Hacker for his work on identi.ca and Laconica
• Penny Leach, Best Education Hacker for her work on Mahara and Moodle

Our Award Winners & Presenters (listed from left to right):

Brian Aker, Leslie Hawthorn, Evan Prodromou, Bruce Momjian, Allison Randal, Nat Torkington
Photo Credit: Pinar Ozyger

Congratulations to Brian, Bruce, Clay, Evan and Penny! Each of them will receive a beautiful (and shiny!) glass statue, along with a 5000 USD cash prize in support of their Open Source development efforts.

The awards are just one part of Google's participation in OSCON 2009. If you're around, come find us, introduce yourself and share your thoughts on all things Open Source.

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

Where to Find Us at OSCON 2009

OSCON has returned to the San Francisco Bay Area for 2009, and Googlers will once again be out in force to spread the joy of all things Google and Open Source. Please make sure to join us on Tuesday, July 21st for the conference opening ceremonies, where we'll announce the winners of the 5th Annual Google O'Reilly Open Source Awards. If you've already arrived for the conference, you may want to stop by our Birds of a Feather session for the Google Summer of Code™ community this evening at 8:00 PM. We're also proud to feed all of you in the great Google tradition at Wednesday's lunch.

And, of course, there will be several talks and tutorials delivered by Googlers, including:

• Introduction to Google App Engine by Joe Gregorio, 8:30 AM on July 20th (tutorial)
• Zen and the Art of Abstraction Maintenance by Alex Martelli, 10:45 AM on July 22nd
• Even Faster Websites by Steve Souders, 11:35 AM on July 22nd
• Getting Started in Free and Open Source, by Cat Allman and Leslie Hawthorn, 11:35 AM on July 22nd
• Programmer Insecurity and the Genius Myth, by Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick, 1:45 PM on July 22nd
• Green Computing for the Little Guys with Bill Weihl, 1:45 PM on July 22nd (panel)
• Your Work in Open Source, the Numbers, by Chris DiBona, 9:15 AM on July 23rd
• JRuby on Google App Engine by John Woodell and Max Ross, joined by Ted Han, 10:45 AM on July 23rd
• The Google Open Source Update, by Chris DiBona and Leslie Hawthorn, 11:35 AM on July 23rd

If you're around Silicon Valley and can't make the entire conference, keep in mind that the Birds of a Feather sessions, OSCamp and a host of other events at OSCON are free of charge to attend with your expo hall registration. We hope to see you there!

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

Now Accepting Nominations for the 5th Annual Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards

The Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards are back again for 2009! These awards recognize individual contributors who have demonstrated exceptional leadership, creativity, and collaboration in the development of Open Source Software. Past recipients for 2005-2008 include Angela Byron, Andrew Tridgell, Harald Welte, Julian Seward, Karl Fogel, Martin Dougiamas, Pamela Jones and Paul Vixie.

The nomination process is open to all, so please send your nominations to [email protected]. Nominations should include the name of the recipient, any associated projects or organizations, suggested title for the award ("Best Hacker", "Best Community Builder", etc.), and a description of why you are nominating the individual. Google and O'Reilly employees are not eligible for the awards, though we thank you if you thought of us.

Nominations close on May 22, 2009. The awards will be presented during the kickoff ceremonies for OSCON 2009. We look forward to hearing from you and having your help to honor those community members who make Open Source that much better for all of us!

Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

... and the winners of the 2008 Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards are...

By Jeff Bailey, Open Source Team

Hello from OSCON! This evening, we hosted the fourth annual Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards. I'm pleased to announce, for those who weren't present, the winners of the 2008 awards:

• Best Community Amplifier: Chris Messina - BarCamp, Microformats and Spread Firefox
• Best Contributor: Angela Byron - Drupal
• Best Education Enabler: Martin Dougiamas - Moodle
• Best Interoperator: Andrew Tridgell - Samba and Rsync
• Defender of Rights: Harald Welte - gplviolations.org

Awards were given out by Google's Chris DiBona and Parrot's Allison Randall to the various recipients, with Bryan Williams accepting on behalf of Martin.

For a special treat, Leslie Hawthorn got up and spoke about Angela's award.

As always, we're having a good time and many of us will be working the Google booth on the exhibition floor tomorrow and Thursday. I'll hope you'll come say "Hi!"

2008 New Zealand Open Source Awards

By Cat Allman, Open Source Team

The deadline for nominations for the 2008 New Zealand Open Source Awards is coming up fast. You have until July 18th GMT (remember the International Dateline!) to submit a nomination, either for an individual Kiwi for their contribution to a project or Open Source in general, or for a New Zealand organization for "exemplary use of open source". The award categories are:

- Open Source Contributor
- Open Source Software Project
- Open Source Use in Government
- Open Source Use in Business
- Open Source Use in Education
- Open Source Use in Infrastructure
- Open Source Use for Community Organizations

Google's Open Source Team is a proud sponsor of the 2008 New Zealand Open Source Awards, and we're excited to ask all of you join in the quest to find the best Kiwi Open Sourcerers. The nominees must all be New Zealanders or New Zealand organizations, but you don't have to be a Kiwi to put in a nomination. The organizers of the awards specifically encourage you to interpret "open source" in its widest sense (i.e. it need not refer to specific licenses), but will generally be taken to mean a technological system where open collaboration and innovation prevails, so be as creative as you like.

Nominate Your Favorite Open Source Project Today

By Brian Fitzpatrick, Google Developer Programs

We're glad to see that our friends over at SourceForge have announced that their Community Choice Awards are open for nominations this year. In the past, the awards have been open to all projects hosted at SourceForge, but this year they've opened up the nomination process to all Open Source projects, regardless of where on the web they call home.

We're pretty excited about this, so we're encouraging everyone to nominate their favorite Open Source project for the awards. Also, if you have an Open Source project and you'd like to encourage people to nominate you, there are various web badges that you can put on your site as well. The awards will be presented at OSCON 2008, so we hope to see you there!

Nominations Open for the Google O'Reilly Open Source Awards

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

Google's Open Source Team and O'Reilly Media are once again teaming up to present five Open Sourcerers with awards at OSCON 2008. Everyone is welcome and encouraged to nominate recipients, so check out our Hall of Fame for inspiration and a list of past winners. We'll be accepting nominations through May 15, 2008; for more details, check out the announcement on the O'Reilly Radar.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Thanks for the Jolt!

By Bob Lee, Google Guice Team

We'd like to thank the Google Guice developers and users who helped jolt the industry in 2007. Dr. Dobb's honored Guice with the 18th annual Jolt Award in the Libraries, Frameworks and Components category:

The Jolt Awards recognize those products, books, and websites that have "jolted" the industry in the past year. Winners are selected by a panel of judges consisting of industry insiders, columnists, and technology leaders.

Past Jolt winners include Josh Bloch for his book Effective Java, Google Groups, and Java 2, to name a few.

Guice makes Java code easier to write, change, unit test and reuse. In a word: agile. Once you've tried Guice, you'll wonder how you lived without it. If you're interested in learning more, check out our introductory tech talk and the Guice home page.

Bob Lee Gets Jolted!

(Photo Credit: Bob Lee)