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Somehow I suspect the open source software (OSS) community will not buy into a product beauty contest anyway but publishers can't help themselves. Sorry, boss!!

Product beauty contests are “round-up stories” or special reports in trade publications and related web sites that attempt to pick the best “foobar of the century” or the leaders in some such categories. InfoWorld is reporting on such a beauty contest this morning called the Best of Open Source Software (BOSSIE) awards, starring Miss OSS Applications, Miss OSS Networks, Miss OSS Platforms and Middleware, Miss OSS Security, and Miss OSS Storage. In each category, there were sashes for different types of each “Miss.” For example, Sugar wore the sash for CRM and OpenBravo for ERP. That was our friend Dave Rosenberg over at Mulesource in the two-piece (suit) in the ESB category.

It’s all in good fun and makes for good after-work discussions. As in, “Is Peckham better than Pele? Woods than Nicklaus? France than Germany?” But my concern is that this one will get the OSS community looking inward when looking at the broader market where users look is more important. Users compare JBoss with WebSphere AS as well as with WebSphere AS Community Edition and at Sugar vs. salesforce.com as well as with SplendidCRM. I am not sure that these best-of-the-year awards are that influential in user decision making in any manner but if I was marketing an OSS foobar, I want to make sure it is on the same page with IBM, Oracle’s and SAP equivalent product, not just on the same page with another OSS community effort.

And apparently there was supposed to be a Miss OSS Enterprise Monitoring and Miss OSS Programming Language as well. But for some reason they are only covered in “Related Articles” (or not at all) depending on which InfoWorld page you click on. Our friends from Zenoss and Hyperic as well as Groundwork and Qluster look like they were in the running before falling off the runway completely. Their category didn’t seem to even get a sash to cover their whatever, based on looking quickly at the accompanying slides shows.

Posted by dennisb in OSS Culture |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

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