Twelve Open Source Projects Snag Top Prize at SourceForge's Community Choice Awards

One of the highlights of the O'Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON) is finding out who won bragging rights in the annual SourceForge Community Choice Awards. More than 47,000 open source projects were nominated for slots in one of 12 categories, but only 85 were chosen as finalists.

The awards party was held last night at the Agenda Lounge in San Jose, CA. where guests gathered to listen to music, snag swag from ThinkGeek, play retro games, and even line up for free tattoos. While past SourceForge parties were recorded with a handheld camera and later uploaded to an online video hosting service, this year the audio/visual setup had a distinctly professional quality. The entire event was shown live on a dedicated Web site for real-time viewing.

Track cameras panned and zoomed guests as they arrived and congregated outside the lounge, and various other cameras positioned around the seating area showed what was going on inside. SourceForge Director of Community Ross Turk roamed the party equipped with a headset and announced winners at random intervals throughout the event.

Speaking of the winners, here they are:

* Best Commercial Open Source Project: PortableApps.com (portableapps.com)
* Best New Project: Eeebuntu (eeebuntu.org)
* Best Project: PortableApps.com (portableapps.com)
* Best Project for Academia: XMind (xmind.net)
* Best Project for Gamers: ScummVM (scummvm.org)
* Best Project for Government: OpenOffice.org (openoffice.org)
* Best Project for Multimedia: Audacity (audacity.sourceforge.net)
* Best Project for the Enterprise: Firebird (firebirdsql.org)
* Best Tool or Utility for Developers: Notepad++ (notepad-plus.sourceforge.net)
* Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins: phpMyAdmin (phpmyadmin.net)
* Best Visual Design: PortableApps.com (portableapps.com)
* Most Likely to Change the Way You Do Everything: PortableApps.com
(portableapps.com)

 "Obviously the big story of the night was PortableApps.com and John Haller’s priceless reaction to winning four awards including Best Project," said Ross Turk, Director of Community for SourceForge. "With the Community Choice Awards growing into a must-attend event, we expanded the party to the online audience for the first time. They deserve a lot of credit for staying glued to our live video stream for hours, participating virtually, & sending in interview requests."

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