SourceForge hands out open source honours

OpenOffice was named the best open source project by SourceForge users

Open source software site SourceForge.net has handed out its third annual Community Choice Awards.

The awards are voted for by the site's users and range in subject and seriousness from "best project for the enterprise" to "most likely to get users sued by anachronistic industry associations defending dead business models".

File-sharing client eMule took the latter title, while open source productivity suite OpenOffice landed the enterprise crown. The free Microsoft Office alternative also took home the awards for "best project for educators" and the overall best project crown.

OpenOffice was one of several projects that took advantage of new rules allowing outside projects to be nominated for awards. Previously, the nominations were limited to projects hosted within SourceForge. Of the 12 awards, only six were given to projects hosted on the site.

Two of those awards went to SQL management tool phpMyAdmin. The project was named the best tool for SysAdmins and was also nominated by users as the "most likely to be the next $1bn acquisition."

Among the more light-hearted awards was "most likely to be ambiguously and baselessly accused of patent violation". That award, and a not-so-subtle shot at Microsoft, went to an open source version of the Windows API known as "Wine is Not an Emulator".

Other awards included the best multimedia project, which went to video tool VLC, and the best tool for developers, which was awarded to the Notepad++ source code editing tool.

Some familiar faces also made an appearance. The award for "most likely to change the world" went to perhaps the most famous piece of open source software ever – Linux.