Open Source has gained a lot of momentum over the past few years. I have seen it grown in popularity and the number of applications available and the growth of communities around it. Being a Sun Campus Ambassador which played a pivotal role in contributing to Open Source community, I was exposed to the Open source early on. And these days we have seen companies like Facebook, Twitter, SpringSource among others contributing to the open source community. Also there are lot of conferences (foss.in, 2011.osidays.com) being organized around these technologies. There are languages (Groovy, Scala, Ruby, JRuby), frameworks (Rails, Grails,Lift) which are growing in their feature set and popularity.
Another such initiative towards helping the open source communities grow and thrive is the Open Source Awards organized annually by Packt Publishing. The 2011 Open Source Awards was launched on the 1st week of August by Packt, inviting people to visit www.PacktPub.com and submit nominations for their favorite Open Source project.
The 2011 Awards will feature a prize fund of $24,000 with several new categories introduced and the vote of the public becoming more influential. This year all CMS projects will compete in an even tighter contest in the Open Source CMS Award category with the now defunct Hall of Fame CMS finalists re-entered into the CMS category. Projects such as Drupal and Joomla! will face off with CMS Made Simple and MODx for the first time since 2008.
While the Most Promising Open Source Project and the Open Source JavaScript Libraries categories will be back for a second year, Packt is introducing new categories for Open Source Business Applications, Open Source Multimedia Software and Open Source Mobile Toolkit and Libraries. These new categories will ensure that the Open Source Awards remain committed to providing the platform to recognise excellence within the community while supporting Open Source projects both new and old.
Packt has opened up nominations for people to submit their favorite Open Source projects for each category at www.PacktPub.com/open-source-awards-home . The top five in each category will go through to the final, which begins mid-September. For more information on the categories, read Packt’s recent announcement: www.packtpub.com/blog/2011-open-source-awards-announcement.
Voting beings from September 19th and goes on till October 31st 2011. So vote to see your favorite open source project winning. And what more you can get lucky to win a Kindle!