Awards Highlight Impact of Open source software-PCWorld

It's hard to beat stellar earnings as evidence of the business value of a technology, and Red Hat provided for Linux with its fourth quarter report last week. Further fuel to add to the festive open source burning the past his days, however, several batches of awards recognize the broad impact of various free Software projects and contributors.

Internet freedom for Egyptians

Last Tuesday, for example, the Free Software Foundation announced the winners of its two awards for 2010. The first of which--called the Award for projects of social benefit--gets each year to a project "that intentionally and significantly benefits society through collaboration an important social task, to complete" in the FSF's own words.

This year, did that price to the Tor Project, a free software project that has enabled some 36 million people around the world to their freedom and anonymity on the Internet to maintain. The Tor Project has proven central in dissident movements in Iran and Egypt, says the FSF.

Previous winners of the Award for projects of social utility have been the Internet Archive, Creative Commons, Groklaw and Wikipedia.

The Award for the Advancement of Free Software is the other award that the FSF each year, and it's going to be an individual who contributed a great deal to the progress and development of free software. This year, the award went to Rob Savoye, founder and CTO of Media is now open and a long time hacker who on GNU and other free software has worked for more than 20 years.

Savoy has contributed to dozens of projects including GCC, GDB, DejaGnu, Newlib, Libgloss, Cygwin, eCos, expect, several major GNU/Linux distributions and one Laptop Per Child. He has also the efforts for the production of the free software Flash player called Gnash.

' Swiss Army Knife of the 21st century '

Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, took the open source Apache Hadoop project the main prize at this year's MediaGuardian Innovation Awards, which were handed out in London last Thursday.

Of the project open source software is designed to help companies such as Facebook and Twitter handle large amounts of data. As such, it was described by the jury as a "Swiss army knife of the 21st century," with the potential to "change the face of media innovations."

Apache Hadoop has the potential to become a catalyst for innovation, in fact, higher than that of other nominees and WikiLeaks the iPad, according to the jury.

Top linux Gurus ' 2011 '

Last, but definitely not least, the Linux Foundation on Monday announced the Top five 2011 Linux.com Linux Gurus, or the most active members of Linux.com in the past year. Linux gurus are chosen on the basis of the points they accumulate by contributing in many ways on the site, including community blogs and message board postings, comments on articles, blogs and boards, and answers to questions from the community.

Linux.com of Ultimate Linux Guru is now Matthew Fillpot, a development and training specialist at an international travel company which since the beginning of 2009 a Linux.com moderator. If the Ultimate Linux Guru, Matthew will receive a fully loaded "Dream Linux Machine."

Aaron Aceves, Andrea Benini, Shane Hatcher and Istimsak are the other four Abdulbasir Linux Gurus for this year. All five will receive invitations to attend the Summit this year the Linux Foundation Collaboration, where they meet the annual Linux.com Planning meeting will participate. They will also receive digital guru badges to help market their skills to potential employers and their status among colleagues.

Job search skills to Linux, 47% year over year, the Linux Foundation site notes, citing Dice.com jobs. You can see the Top 50 Linux Gurus exhibited in a special section on Linux.com.

There can be no doubt left that free and open source software is a key factor for business--and the world? I don't think so. Is it not time that your company of everything which benefited has to offer?

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