OStatic

InfoWorld is preparing for its annual Bossie awards, a list of the best open source software choices for business. The Bossie awards usually include some surprises, as you'll find among last year's winners. (Are you a Splunk or Ophcrack user?) InfoWorld plans to name this year's Bossie winners on August 31st, but in advance of that, the publication has compiled its list of the 36 most useful and important free open source projects in history. Some of the hall of famers are obvious, such as Ubuntu, but not all of them are.

We've written about the folks at CodeWeavers before. They make a customized, commercial version of Wine called CrossOverLinux. and have been major contributors to Wine. (Wine allows Linux users to run Windows applications.) This post from the CodeWeavers blog details how the company has succesfully ported versions of Chromium--the open source core of Google's Chrome browser--for Mac and Linux. The ports are free and available here. You won't want to run these ports as your main browser, but as proof-of-concept for cross-platform versions of Chrome, this is good news.

Where is Rodney Dangerfield when we need him? There are some heated messages flying around in the Ubuntu forums because NBC has announced that it will offer its online video coverage of the Beijing Olympics to Internet Explorer and Firefox users on the Mac and Windows, but not to Linux browser users. This means the considerable amount of online video available to other users is out of reach of the Linux crowd, writes one forum poster. You wonder why they'd want to kiss off 2%-3% of the desktops, writes another. Would it really be so difficult to offer video to users of Firefox on Linux?

As the LinuxWorld trade show continues in San Francisco, lots of announcements and events are arriving, although there are some rumblings about the show catering too much to the establishment. There is an Installfest going on, where volunteers are building Linux-based systems for needy schools. If you remember the gOS, which was the Linux OS inside the $199 Wal-Mart gPC, it is now reaching out to Google Gadgets, and preloads WINE for users who want to reach out to Windows applications. There are also several awards being given to some of the innovative products at the show. Here's the upshot.

We covered the SourceForge Community Choice Awards announcement in early July, and now the winners have been named. This marks the first year when SourceForge's awards for the best open source projects have been open to all open source projects. OpenOffice is far and away the big winner, but I was pleased to see some lesser known projects get recognition, too. Here, below the fold, are the winners.