The annual Australian Open Source Awards are intended to encourage and recognise the excellence and dedication of Australians contributing to the open source arena.
The Second Australian Open Source Awards were presented at the AUUG 2003 Conference dinner, held in Sydney on Thursday 4th September 2003.
The Australian Open Source Awards are sponsored by Silicon Breeze, who design and provide the solid gold "tux" award statues which embody the open source spirit.
The awards were given in four categories: technology, application, community, and special achievement. The first three awards were decided by the popular vote of the AUUG membership, and the special achievement category was judged by committee. Membership of AUUG is open to any individual or corporation with an interest in open computing technologies.
Awarded for open source work that provides technology or programming infrastructure, such as operating systems, programming languages and compilers, or database systems.
The nominees were:
| Martin Pool | For the "distcc" distributed compiler. (http://sourcefrog.net/weblog/projects/distcc). |
| Peter Chubb | For work on large block device support in Linux. |
| Luke Mewburn | For work on the core NetBSD team leading to NetBSD 1.6.*. (http://www.netbsd.org/). |
| Luke Howard | For work on the Linux LDAP nameservice libraries. (http://www.padl.com/). |
The winner was Martin Poole.
Awarded for open source work that is focused on solving a particular problem or is for use by end users rather than system builders. Examples include email clients, text processing systems, web browsers, or maybe a program that carries out a complex scientific calculation.
The nominees were:
| Andrew Tridgell | For rsync. (http://samba.org/rsync/) |
| The Karst Index Database Team, specifically Michael Lake, Rick Welykochy, Peter Matthews | For the Karst Index Database, which catalogues all caves in Australia. (http://www.caves.org.au/kid_docs/set_kid.htm) |
| David Hughes | For Mini SQL (also known as mSQL). (http://www.hughes.com.au/). |
The winner was Andrew Tridgell.
Awarded for a significant contribution to the open source community. This could be by publicising open source, making open source more acceptable to business, encouraging communication and cooperation between open source developers, or any other activity that makes it easier for open source code to be developed.
The nominees were:
| Kimberley Shelt | Setting up LinMagAu, promoting the cause of open source and highlighting Australian contributions to the community. (http://www.linmagau.org/) |
| Jeff Waugh | Open source evangelism, significant contributions to the Gnome project and promotion of Linux in Australia. |
| Leon Brooks | Major contributions to the adoption of open source software in the Australian IT industry. |
| Dr Horst Herb | Promotion of open source to the Australian medical community, founding of GNUMed project (http://www.gnumed.net/), writing of "gnotary" (http://www.gnumed.net/gnotary/), and creation of "Free Peer Reviewed Pharmaceutical Reference" (http://www.drugref.org/). |
The winner was Kimberley Shelt.
This was awarded to Paul “Rusty” Russell, for work on Linux and for Open Source advocacy.