Every year since 2000, Linux New Media (found at http:// www. linuxnewmedia. com) has asked the members of an international jury to dish out honors for outstanding achievement in the broad field of free software. The jury comprises personalities from the Open Source movement, authors, journalists, government offices, and representatives of industry. Every year, new award categories reflect new trends. This year sees new awards for virtualization and anti-spam solutions.
In the new “Best Combination of Community and Commerce” category, Ubuntu and Mark Shuttleworth’s Canonical won for achieving a balancing act between community-based development and commercial enterprise. Trolltech and KDE were close runners-up. Combinations of Novell/ openSuse and Red Hat/ Fedora were clear losers. Many observers expected Xen and VMware to play a leading role in the virtualization stakes. In terms of market share, VMware is the king of the hill, but Xen has achieved much popularity thanks to integration with some well-known Linux distributions. The fact that third place went to the LGPL-licensed Qemu emulator was a surprise. Although the gap to the second-placed product was clear, Qemu did outpace OpenVZ, LinuxVserver Parallels, and User Mode Linux..

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