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DNN Blog
Nov
23
Posted by:
Shaun Walker
11/23/2010
I noticed that the winners of the PackT Press Open Source Awards for 2010 were announced last week. The PackT Press Open Source Awards are an annual contest that aims to encourage, support, recognize and reward Open Source projects. As a proud supporter of Open Source software and communities, we would like to congratulate the winners in each category. 
In previous years the PackT contest was named the Open Source Content Management System (CMS) Award. As the old name suggests, the award used to be focused specifically on open source content management and had a number of different categories to cater to different platforms and levels of project maturity. In 2008, DotNetNuke achieved its highest distinction with a third place finish in the Overall category behind Drupal and Joomla!. This year PackT Press opened up the contest to a wider range of Open Source projects by creating a number of new categories for open source tools related to graphics, e-commerce, and javascript libraries. You may be wondering why DotNetNuke is not represented amongst the finalists of the Content Management category this year. As much as we highly appreciate the efforts of PackT Press in bringing high quality books about various open source technologies to market ( including DotNetNuke ), we decided to decline participation in the contest this year. In the early years, the contest was driven by popularity and provided an exciting venue to help raise visibility and awareness of open source CMS projects through community involvement. We promoted the contest extensively through all of our available community channels to ensure DotNetNuke was recognized. However there was also a subjective component to the finalist judging and unfortunately, in recent years we had witnessed analysts and other research firms utilize the final outcome of the contest as a method for establishing the true value of an open source CMS. Now, we are not saying the results of the contest are not useful; rather, we feel they need to be considered alongside a variety of other useful data points to paint a true picture of the market landscape. The finalists this year in the Open Source CMS category were CMS Made Simple, MODx, mojoPortal ( it is great to see at least one ASP.NET option make the cut – congratulations to Joe Audette ), SilverStripe, and XOOPS. And the winner was CMS Made Simple who got to take home the $2500 prize. Based on the changes which PackT made to the contest in 2010, it is possible that we may decide to participate next year. But before we make that decision, I would actually like to hear what the community thinks of these contests – do they have value for DotNetNuke or not?
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