Andover.Net Opens Balloting for First Annual Slashdot Open Source Community Awards
Slashdot Awards to Honor Open Source Innovators with Propeller-Topped Beanies with a Total of $100,000 in Financial Support
Acton, Mass.January 3, 2000 Andover.Net (NASDAQ: ANDN) the Internet's leading Linux destination, today opened the balloting for the First Annual Slashdot Open Source Community Awards, a.k.a. Slashdot Beanie Awards. These awards are sponsored and organized by Slashdot.org, the "News for Nerds: Stuff that Matters" Web site founded by Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda and Jeff "Hemos" Bates. CmdrTaco and Hemos know they have an opinionated audience and are enabling the Open Source Community to vote for the developers and projects that are leading the Open Source revolution. Andover.Net will distribute a total of $100,000 in cash prizes ranging from the big $30,000 award for Most Improved Open Source Project and a $10,000 Most Improved Kernel Module to a more lighthearted $2,000 Best Unix Desktop Eyecandy Award. Propeller-topped beanie awards will also be given to eight lucky winners. All Slashdot Open Source Award recipients will be honored in an awards ceremony Webcast live on February 3 at the Linux World Expo in New York. "This has been a year of tremendous growth for the Open Source community and all the groups, projects and developers who comprise it," said Bruce Twickler, president and CEO of Andover.Net. "Andover.Net organized the Beanies to provide a forum for the Open Source world to recognize its innovators and to give them financial support to help further their work. We also hope to have a little fun while doing it." In true Open Source fashion, the Slashdot Open Source Community Awards ask members of the community to nominate candidates in 16 different award categories. Beginning today through January16, registered Slashdot readers can log onto the site and submit their nominations for:
$30,000 Prize
The Open Source Community is all about flexibility and nothing is beyond the reach of fine-tuningconsequently neither are the Slashdot Community Awards. Readers can change their votes as many times as they like through January 16. On January 17, the top five nominees in each category will be announced and the second phase of voting begins. From January 17 through January 31, Slashdot will post a voting page with the five finalists in each category. Readers will log on and cast their votes for the number one nominee in each category. "If we tried selecting five nominees and told our audience to choose a winner, our readers would spend the next week complaining that we picked the wrong five," Malda said. "This whole open voting thing is really just a cheap way for us to shirk responsibility for handling nominationsand quite honestly, our audience is better suited to pick them anyway."
About Andover.Net Andover.Net (NASDAQ: ANDN) is the leading Linux destination. Serving over 2.4 million users and over 50 million page impressions on a monthly basis, Andover.Net (www.andover.net) includes a unique combination of news and reviews; resources for buyers, developers and programmers; and e-Tools for Web builders. For the latest Open Source and Linux news, reviews, resources and geek merchandise visitors go to Slashdot (slashdot.org) the leading site for Open Source programmers; Freshmeat.net (www.freshmeat.net), a leading Linux software and news Web site, FreeCode (www.freecode.com), where users can easily view and use free code, DaveCentral-Linux (linux.davecentral.com) with over 1,500 downloadable Linux products and ThinkGeek (www.thinkgeek.com) an online Linux and Open Source programming related retailer. MediaBuilder (www.mediabuilder.com) is the largest online Web-building resource with unique e-Tools including GIFWorks (www.gifworks.com) and HTMLWorks (www.htmlworks.com) and it also includes Animation Factory (www.animfactory.com), the Internet's largest GIF image library. Corporate buyers, developers and programmers download products at DaveCentral (www.davecentral.com) and Slaughterhouse (www.slaughterhouse.com), which provides over 6,000 free downloadable Windows software products. For the latest technology news, reviews and resources visitors go to AndoverNews (www.andovernews.com); The IT Managers Journal (www.itmanagersjournal.com); the Internet Traffic Report (www.internettrafficreport.com), providing Internet performance data every 15 minutes; TechMailings (www.techmailings.com) with over 3,900 free e-mail newsletters and discussion lists and TechSightings (www.techsightings.com), reviews of the Web's best sites.