Help determine a Codie Award winner

Each year the Software & Information Industry Association sponsors the Codie Awards for excellence in software. This year I’m one of the preliminary judges for the Best Open Source Product or Service category. You can help me pick a winner.

In order to be eligible for a Codie Award, you have to be nominated. Companies generally nominate their own products. In the open source world, much of the best software is produced by groups of developers rather than companies, which explains why the real best open source software products won’t be winning the award this year. That, and the $395 nomination fee for non-SIIA members.

Only five companies nominated products this year: Lindows.com‘s LindowsOS 4.0, MySQL AB‘s MySQL database server, NetBeans‘ NetBeans IDE 3.5.1, Red Hat‘s Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Stata Laboratories’SAproxy. I’m looking forward to playing with all of them.

My opinion, however, is worth only so much. I’m much more interested in NewsForge readers’ opinions. If you click on Polls at the top of the page under the NewsForge tab, you should be able to vote for the product you think is best.

I’ll weigh your opinions heavily when making out my Codie ballot. No, your vote won’t get to determine who runs the state of California, but voting won’t be a waste of your time either.

By the way, I’m not the only Codie judge on staff. Stay tuned!