Awards for development of build tool presented

[Bram Moolenaar]

In July I have invited you to help working on the A-A-P project and have
a chance to win a Zimbu Award.  The awards have now been presented.

Many software developers work on freely distributable computer programs
without compensation.  Thus it does not provide them with money and the
work must be done next to a job or studies.  An expression of
appreciation for the work done is appropriate.  Mostly this appreciation
only consists of an informal "thank you" from users.  For the A-A-P
project we wanted to do more than that and the contest for the Zimbu
Awards was put in place.  Zimbu is the A-A-P mascot.


The three Zimbu Award winners are:

Adriaan de Groot receives the 444 euro award for "the best contribution
to the A-A-P project".  He has tracked down a large number of problems
and provided solutions. He changed the documentation from SGML to XML
and wrote an explanation about how to get the required tools for XML.
Adriaan added support for "libtool", helped implementing language
modules and improved the robustness of several commands.

Rui Lopes receives the 222 euro award for "the most useful patch for Aap
or Agide".  Rui made the FreeBSD port of Aap and supplied patches to
make installing Aap work a lot better. The quality of his patches was
remarkably high. By making the FreeBSD port he also increased the
visibility of the A-A-P project.

Joerg Beyer receives the 111 euro award for "the brightest idea for the
A-A-P project".  Joerg has supplied several solutions for tricky
problems in the Aap implementation. The scope support was based on his
ideas, he made a first implementation for the automatic configuration
support and improved the setup for testing.  Strangely, not much of his
code ended up in Aap, but his suggestions were indispensible.
Joerg replied that he donates the money to the ICCF Holland foundation,
the charity that Bram Moolenaar promotes to help needy children in
Uganda (http://iccf-holland.org/).


Adriaan de Groot, the winner of the main prize, was pleasantly surprised
with the award being presented to him in person.  It happens to be that
the winner works not far from where the A-A-P project leader lives.
Everybody in the world had an equal oppurtunity to get the prize.
Adriaan has clearly given the largest contribution to the project.  Bram
Moolenaar, the A-A-P project leader, assures that the distance was of no
importance when selecting the winner.

When asked whether the chance to win a Zimbu Award has motivated him to
work on A-A-P Adriaan replies this was indeed so.  He has a limited
amount of time available and a lot of plans.  Nevertheless, his
appreciation for the capabilities of Aap also played an important role.
He expects that Aap will make building KDE applications a lot simpler.
Adriaan intends to keep working on this the coming months, thus he
certainly deserves the Zimbu Award.

Obviously, the development of Aap and Agide continues.  Despite the
passing of the deadline for the Zimbu Awards the A-A-P maillist is busy
with discussions about further improvements.  We are thankful that many
developers are willing to spend time on improving open-source software
without getting a prize.

The prizes have been made available by Stichting NLnet, the organisation
that also funded the setup of the A-A-P project.


There may be some confusion about the names.  A short explanation:
A-A-P:      The name of the project.  It is not an abbreviation, it was
             selected because the "a-a-p.org" domain was available and
             sorts nicely.
Aap:        Name of the major program in the A-A-P project.  Aap
             executes recipes, which are files that describe work to be
             done.  It can be compared to "make", but is more robust,
             portable and has many more features.
Agide:      Another program of the A-A-P project.  It stands for "A-A-P
             GUI IDE".  It is a flexible software development platform.
Zimbu:      The A-A-P mascot.  Aap is the Dutch word for monkey.


For pictures of the award presentation: http://www.a-a-p.org/zimbu_award.html

For questions: Bram Moolenaar  <Bram@a-a-p.org>


About the A-A-P project:
------------------------

A-A-P makes it easy to locate, download, build and install software. It
also supports browsing source code, developing programs, managing
different versions and distribution of software and documentation. This
means that A-A-P is useful both for users and for developers.

A-A-P is an open-source software project: everybody can contribute and
the software is freely distributable under the GNU GPL.

URL: http://www.a-a-p.org/


About Stichting NLnet:
----------------------

NLnet is a non-profit organization with a mission and a philosophy.  The
mission is to advance network technology.  The philosophy is Open
Source.

NLnet supports a wide range of projects and activities, varying from
software development and scientific research to information
dissemination in the form of workshops, conferences and exchange
programs.

All results of research and development supported by NLnet, such as
software, publications and experience, are made available under open
source software licenses for further development, deployment and
distribution.

URL: http://www.nlnet.nl/


About Bram Moolenaar:
---------------------

Bram Moolenaar is the project leader of A-A-P.  He worked full-time on
the project for the past one and a half year.  Bram is mostly known for
his work on Vim, the text editor that is included with most Linux
distributions and voted "best editor" several times.

URL: http://www.moolenaar.net/


-- 
hundred-and-one symptoms of being an internet addict:
160. You get in the elevator and double-click the button for the floor
      you want.

  /// Bram Moolenaar -- Bram@Moolenaar.net -- http://www.Moolenaar.net   \\\
///          Creator of Vim - Vi IMproved -- http://www.Vim.org          \\\
\\\              Project leader for A-A-P -- http://www.A-A-P.org        ///
  \\\  Help AIDS victims, buy here: http://ICCF-Holland.org/click1.html  ///