The annual AUUG Australian Open Source Awards are intended to encourage and recognise the excellence and dedication of Australians contributing to the open source arena.
The Third Australian Open Source Awards were presented at the close of AOSS6 - the Sixth AUUG Australian Open Source Symposium - held on Thursday 28th October 2004 in Perth.
Voting for the awards was open to members of AUUG, and for the first time in 2004 voting was also opened to members of Linux Australia and SAGE-AU.
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:
| Peter Chubb | For work on Linux user mode device drivers. (http://www.gelato.unsw.edu.au/IA64wiki/UserLevelDrivers) |
| Mark Hammond | For work on the Python Win32 Extensions. (http://starship.python.net/crew/mhammond/win32/Downloads.html) |
| David Hook | For work on the Bouncy Castle JCE provider. (http://www.bouncycastle.org/) |
| Andrew Morton | For work on the Linux kernel. (http://www.zipworld.com.au/~akpm/linux/) |
The award was won by Andrew Morton.
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:
| Conrad Parker | For work on the Sweep sound wave editor. (http://www.metadecks.org/software/sweep/index.html) |
| Richard Sharpe | For work on the Ethereal network analyzer. (http://www.ethereal.com/) |
| Jeff Waugh | For work as the GNOME Release Coordinator. (http://www.gnome.org/) |
The award was won by Richard Sharpe.
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:
| Mike Battersby | For outstanding contribution to the Linux community, particularly involvement in the foundation of LUV. (http://www.luv.asn.au/) |
| Kylie Davies | For outstanding contribution in making Linux widely available through the Computerbank Project. (http://www.computerbank.org.au/) |
| Duane Groth | For outstanding contribution to the CAcert free certificate authority. (http://www.cacert.org/) |
| Jeremy Malcolm | For outstanding contribution to the understanding of para-technical and legal issues surrounding open source within the Australian context. |
The award was won by Jeremy Malcolm.
The Special Achievement Award was not awarded this year.