NZ Open Source Award winners announced

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Wellington, Tuesday 9th November 2010 – The NZ Open Source Awards 2010 celebrate the acceptance and importance of open source software in mainstream IT.

This evening the NZ Open Source Awards 2010 celebrated and rewarded the best and most innovative in New Zealand’s open source software at a gala event attended by more than 200 people at the Intercontinental Wellington with Mark Cubey, Producer of Saturday Morning with Kim Hill on Radio New Zealand, as MC.

Winners included the IRD’s Moodle online learning system, content management system SilverStripe, personal production hub Ponoko, the open source future of education Albany Senior High School and Te Papa restoration project Ghosts in the Form of Gifts. Annie McCarron won the People’s Choice award for her work on the Alcoholics Anonymous websites, while Tabitha Roder won the Open Source Contributor award and Linux.conf.au organisers Andrew and Suzanne Ruthvern won in the Open Source Advocate category.

The winner of the University of Auckland’s Department of Computer Science Clinton Bedogni Prize for Open Systems, worth $10,000, was announced as Rob O'Callahan for his significant contributions to Mozilla Firefox and open web standards.

The final award of the night, the Catalyst Lifetime Achievement in Open Source Award, was given to University of Auckland Associate Professor of Statistics Dr. Ross Ihaka. Dr. Ihaka is one of the originators of the world-renown ‘R’ programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics. In 2008 Dr. Ihaka was the recipient of the Royal Society of New Zealand's Pickering Medal, also for his work on ‘R’.

Judge and respected open source advocate Nathan Torkington (organiser of Kiwi Foo Camp, board member for InternetNZ, SilverStripe, and The Perl Foundation and founder of open.org.nz) said this year’s Awards were notable for the diversity of the winners with open source being put in the hands of school children, taxpayers, crafters and historians. “Gone are the days when open source software existed only for open source developers,” he said.

“The diversity of the awards and winners show that New Zealand is holding its own with international trends. Ponoko and ‘Ghosts in the Form of Gifts’ reflect a change in manufacturing, from mass production to ‘my production’ and the focus on education with One Laptop per Child (OLPC) and Albany Senior High School reflects the growing importance and use of open source in education around the world.”

Fellow judge and well-known Kiwiblog creator David Farrar agrees. He said: “For many years in New Zealand the debate has been about whether to use open source software at all. Now the debate is about when and how to use it, and how to get maximum benefits from it.

“What New Zealanders have discovered is that open source is not so much about price or availability, but about innovation, about the ability to take what others have done, customise it and then share that with others.”

Torkington adds: “The New Zealand software community is thriving and open source is a booming part of that.”

The NZ Open Source Awards 2010 are sponsored by Platinum sponsors Catalyst IT and InternetNZ, Gold sponsors Red Hat and the New Zealand Open Source Society, and Silver sponsors OSS, Egressive, SilverStripe, Squiz and 3Months.

The full list of winners and their categories is:

Open Source in Government
IRD’s use of Moodle

Open Source in Education
Albany Senior High School

Open Source Use in Business
Ponoko – the hub of a global personal manufacturing eco-system that brings together creators, digital fabricators, materials suppliers and buyers to make almost anything

Open Source Use in the Arts
Ghosts in the Form of Gifts – the use of open source technologies and design to recreate some of the lost treasures of the Te Papa collection from photographs and drawings

Open Source Project
SilverStripe – a New Zealand-made CMS that has been downloaded more than 325,000 times globally in less than four years

Open Source Advocate
Linux.conf.au organisers Andrew & Suzanne Ruthvern

Open Source Contributor
Tabitha Roder for One Laptop per Child (OLPC)

People’s Choice
Amie McCarron for the Alcoholics Anonymous NZ websites

The University of Auckland Clinton Bedogni Prize for Open Systems Rob O'Callahan for his significant contributions to Mozilla Firefox and open web standards

The Catalyst Lifetime Achievement in Open Source Award
Dr. Ross Ihaka, for the ‘R’ statistical programming and graphics language

ENDS

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