SAN FRANCISCO, April 20 /PRNewswire/ -- USENIX, the Advanced Computing
Systems Association, celebrating its 30th anniversary, honored GNOME co-
founder Miguel de Icaza and KDE creator Mattias Ettrich with its Software
Tools User Group (STUG) award for their accomplishments in developing user
friendly graphical user interfaces for the open source desktop.
The STUG award, which recognizes significant contributions to the open
source reusable code-base, selected de Icaza and Ettrich for their
achievements in creating a set of libraries, tools, and applications which are
portable and run across several different operating system platforms and
hardware architectures. The award was announced at the 2005 USENIX Annual
Technical Conference.
"With the development of user friendly GUIs, both de Icaza and Ettrich are
credited with overcoming a significant obstacle in the proliferation of open
source," said Ellie Young, Executive Director, USENIX. "Their efforts have
significantly contributed to the growing popularity of the open source desktop
among the general public."
The KDE project, launched in October of 1996, followed by GNOME in August
of 1997 were initiated to develop desktops that were easy to use, mapped to
traditional UNIX philosophies, and gave access to all of the underlying
features that the UNIX Command-Line User Interface (CLI) contained.
While the KDE and GNOME desktops competed with each other, they also
served to strengthen each other, resulting in a range of applications that
have allowed different implementations of the UNIX operating system into the
non-technical marketplace. By embracing the concepts of free and open source
software, the desktop projects allowed for freely distributed code that
allowed any distribution or software developer to utilize these graphical
features.
About the USENIX Association
USENIX is the Advanced Computing Systems Association. For 30 years, it has
been the leading community for engineers, system administrators, scientists,
and technicians working on the cutting edge of the computing world. USENIX
conferences are the essential meeting grounds for the presentation and
discussion of technical advances in all aspects of computing systems. For more
information about the USENIX Association, visit http://www.usenix.org/ .
SOURCE USENIX Association
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Related links:
http://www.usenix.org
CONTACT:
Wendy Grubow of River Meadow Communications,
+1-831-626-7503, or wendy@usenix.org
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