Drum Roll... The winners of the 2007 Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards are...

By Zaheda Bhorat, Open Source Programs

Last night, July 24, at the Open Source Conference in Portland the winners of the coveted Google-O'Reilly Open Source Award were announced.

Following in the footsteps of past key contributors and open source visionaries, the five winners for 2007 are :

Karl Fogel - Best Community Builder
There's a common saying that open source isn't so much about the code itself, but about the communities that thrive around it. And Karl has become an oracle when it comes to the management of open source communities. As the founder and leader of the Subversion project, the harmony within the Subversion community has been attributed to Karl, because of his consistent leadership and maintenance of the culture-of-respect. This and his transfer of wisdom on community management into a book ("Producing Open Source Software", O'Reilly Media, also at producingoss.com) makes Karl our 2007 Best Community Builder.

Pamela Jones - Best FUD Fighter
When the SCO drama was being played out, one website became the place to get your knowledge. Pamela, or PJ, as she is known, leads research and reporting of legal events important to the FOSS community. Through her tremendous work, Groklaw continues to be the place to get our regular dose of legal insight and analysis.

Aaron Leventhal - Best Accessibility Architect
Aaron Leventhal is a long-time supporter of accessibility efforts. Earlier in his career he worked on a Braille publishing system used by teachers, publishers and individual Braille readers. He later joined Netscape as accessibility architect for Mozilla development, and has been involved with the Mozilla project almost since its beginnings. Aaron has single-handedly succeeded in turning Firefox from being an also-ran in web accessibility to being the preferred accessibility solution going forward.

David Recordon - Best Strategist
OpenID has gone from hack to Internet staple in an incredibly short period of time. Dave Recordon has turned OpenID into a viable alternative to non-open identity systems. He has taken on many organizations and made real headway towards pushing Identity into the open source space. This guy knows challenging, and he's met and conquered every challenge. For that reason David is this year's Best Strategist for his work on OpenID. All this, and he's not yet old enough to buy alcohol in the US.

Paul Vixie - Outstanding Lifetime Contributions
For decades Paul been one of the key players in the Domain Name System. He wrote and still maintains BIND, the nameserver most of the Internet uses. He's co-founded MAPS, a non-profit that fights spam. He's the operator of the F root server and he also holds the record for the most CERT security advisories. For his many contributions significant to the existence of the Internet, the "Outstanding Lifetime Contributions" winner is Paul Vixie.

Check here for OSCON pictures and blog posts from OSCON and the Open Source Awards event.

We would like to thank The Google and O'Reilly Open Source Awards Committee members and especially to each of you who participated in our first open nomination process for this award.

Until next year, please join us in congratulating each of our worthy winners for 2007.