SourceForge Gears Up For Community Choice Awards

SourceForge combed through more than 47,000 nominations to announce which of the open source projects it hosts are finalists in the Fourth Annual Community Choice Awards. Eighty-five projects in 12 categories are in the running and the winners will be announced on July 23, 2009 at OSCON.

Categories run the gamut from technical (Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins) and entertaining (Best Project for Gamers) to "life-changing" (Most Likely to Change the Way You Do Everything). Nominated projects are equally wide-ranging and while there are a number of familiar names like KeePass Password Safe and Audacity, quite a few lesser known projects are being given the opportunity to shine. Avogadro, a cross platform, 3-dimensional molecular editor, is up for Best Project for Academia and microblogging client Choqok has been nominated for Best New Project.

One of the most intriguing nominations is rtmpdump which is up for Best Project in Multimedia. Earlier this year, Adobe issued a DMCA removal request through SourceForge which resulted in a complete shutdown of the project. SourceForge's Director of Community, Ross Turk, says, "...let’s just say that I wholeheartedly appreciate the 'screw the man' sentiment, even if 'the man' includes us this time. The world is not a perfect place quite yet."

At least one project team is already making post-award plans in case they win. Aaron Fulkerson, co-founder and CEO of Mindtouch says if his project wins an award for Best Commercial Open Source Project, he'll get a robot tattooed on his leg.

Disclosure: Lisa Hoover is the SourceForge Community Blogger but derives no benefit from the company for writing this post.