Australian open source winners announced

Unix, Linux and open source advocates converged at the Duxton Hotel in North Sydney last night to witness the Second Annual Australian Open Source Awards organised by the Australian Unix and Open Systems User Group (AUUG).

Three awards for technology award, application and community were determined by AUUG members via an online voting system, and a fourth award was for special achievement which was solely determined by the AUUG committee. The winners included:

Technology award: Martin Pool won the top prize for his work on the "distcc" distributed compiler. As part of the Samba team, Pool is the author of distcc, a project that began in early 2002 and is the foundation of Apple's XCode Distributed Build. Runners up were Peter Chubb, Luke Mewburn and Luke Howard.

Application award: Andrew Tridgell, famously known as the founder of Samba, the widely used network file system, bagged this award for authoring rsync, a tool designed to transfer files across a network efficiently. Tridgell currently works at OzLabs, IBM's Linux team based in Canberra working with the IBM Almaden Research Center remotely on building a single unified storage model for users from NAS and SAN systems. Runners up were The Karst Index Database Team that included Michael Lake, Rick Welykochy, Peter Matthews and David Hughes.

Community award: Kimberley Shelt came out tops in this category. Earlier this year, she set up LinMagAu, an online publication for Linux users in Australia, highlighting local issues, developer events and open source development tips that help promote open source and highlight Australian contributions to the community. Runners up were Jeff Waugh, Leon Brooks and Dr Horst Herb.

Special achievement award 2003: Paul "Rusty" Russell was honoured for his continual contribution to the Linux kernel. Russell, who also works at IBM's Linux Technology Centre in Canberra, organised the first Australian Linux conference and is the author of Rusty's Unreliable Guides to kernel hacking.