MELBOURNE, Australia -- 6 September 2002 -- The Australian UNIX and Open Systems User Group (AUUG, Inc.) today announced the winners of the inaugural Australian Open Source Awards. The awards encourage and recognise the excellence and dedication of Australians contributing in the Open Source arena.

The awards ceremony took place during the AUUG 2002 Annual Conference Dinner held last night in Melbourne. Please visit http://classic.auug.org.au/conf/auug2002/ for further details.

The Australian Open Source Awards are sponsored by Silicon Breeze (http://www.siliconbreeze.com), 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.

The Technology Award

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:
 

Luke Mewburn	For work on the core NetBSD team (http://www.netbsd.org/).
Eric Young	For work on SSLeay (http://www.psy.uq.edu.au/~ftp/Crypto/).
Darren Reed	For work on ipfilter (http://coombs.anu.edu.au/~avalon/ip-filter.html).
Andrew Cagney	For work on gdb (http://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/).

The winner was Eric Young.

The Application Award

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 complex scientific calculations.

The nominees were:
 

Peter Miller	For work on Aegis (http://aegis.sourceforge.net/).
Justin Clift	For the postgreSQL documentation website (http://www.postgresql.org/).
Andrew Nicholson	For work on Active (http://active.org.au/, more at http://indymedia.org/).
Matthew Chapman	For work on rdesktop (http://www.rdesktop.org/).

The winner was Matthew Chapman.

The Community Award

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:
 

Anthony Towns	For work as the release manager on Debian's "Woody" release (http://www.debian.org/).
Jacqueline McNally	For marketing and community relations work with OpenOffice.org (http://www.openoffice.org/), Computer Angels (http://www.ca.asn.au/), Perth Linux Users' Group (PLUG) (http://www.plug.org.au/), and the Society of Linux Professionals Western Australia (SLPWA) (http://www.slpwa.asn.au/).
Con Zymaris	For editing AUUGN for many years.
Christopher Kings-Lynne	For co-founding Pandaemonium, the WA BSD users group.

The winner was Con Zymaris.

Special Achievement Ward

The winner was Andrew Tridgell for his work on SAMBA, the seamless file and print service for SMB/CIFS (Windows) clients.

About AUUG Incorporated
AUUG Inc. is the Australian UNIX and Open Systems User Group, a professional association for end users, corporations, developers and vendors that promotes UNIX® and related systems, including Linux and BSD.  Dating from 1975, AUUG is a national body with chapters that organize local activities in most capital cities.

Visit http://classic.auug.org.au/

Press Contact
Gordon Hubbard
Treasurer and Press Secretary, AUUG Inc.
<Gordon.Hubbard@auug.org.au>
Tel: 02 9659 9590

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