OStatic

What do Pamela Jones, Chris Messina, Doc Searls, and Angela Byron all have in common? Aside from being very cool people, they?re also all past winners of a Google-O?Reilly Open Source Award.

The honor is bestowed on people in the FOSS community? who have ?demonstrated exceptional leadership, creativity, and collaboration in the development of open source software. The 2009 award winner will be announced at this? year?s O?Reilly Open Source Convention 2009 (OSCON) later this summer so if you know someone who you?d like to see win, there are still a few weeks left to nominate your favorite geek.

Red Hat commissioned a study released today that takes a fascinating look at which countries use the most open source software. The usual suspects -- the U.S., UK, and China -- made the top of the list and Africa brings a decent show of support to the table, no doubt due, in part, to the efforts of the One Laptop Per Child program. The interactive Open Source Environment Map Red Hat created to display the results is a terrific visual representation of where FOSS is found, and where the community needs to step up its efforts toward the goal of worldwide FOSS adoption.

As you can imagine, I've read plenty of articles over the years about the good, the bad, and the ugly of women in tech. Everyone has a theory on why it's easier or harder for us these days, and virtually every woman I know who is even tangentially associated with the tech industry has at least one hair-raising story to tell. Just when I thought there was nothing new under the sun about this topic,?Linux Magazine's Rikki Kite came along with an insightful look at why women might be their own worst enemy when it come to getting ahead in their tech careers.?

If April showers bring May flowers, what does May bring? That's when student developers in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program buckle down and get to work. The popular volunteer program drew almost 5,900 proposals from nearly 3,500 applicants who are no doubt pacing the floor until Google posts the list of accepted candidates. They'll have to wait until April 20 to find out.

There is plenty of enthusiasm surrounding the idea of open source solutions in healthcare, but getting policies in place hasn't been easy. Open source advocate Fred Trotter was prepared to do battle when he met recently with representatives of the Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology (CCHIT), but got a pleasant surprise instead. [Several] issues were brought up in the meeting, he writes, and CCHIT is listening to everyone.

Trotter went to the meeting loaded for bear. The FOSS community, to the degree that such a thing is possible, had authorized me to go nuclear on the issue before the meeting, he writes. I had been given assurance that the community has been so frustrated with dealing with CCHIT that if they did not work with us that if I started an alternative certification program that I would be backed up with the dollars and brains from the community needed to make an alternative certification go.

Popular open source media player project VLC put out a call this week looking for Mac OS X developers. The team released an update solely for Mac users that includes updated libraries, buggy behavior on Power PC-based Macs, and an apology to the entire Mac community.