Everyone's a winner at the NZ Open Source Awards

Last night the New Zealand Open Source Awards were held in Wellington, and we were lucky enough to take home the trophy for the Best NZ Open Source Project for SilverStripe CMS thanks to its adoption by the community, web developers, and customers. Thanks all!

Brian Calhoun accepts the award for SilverStripe CMS

Our CEO Brian Calhoun collected the trophy, but gave the praise away. "This award is all about our amazing open source community. Not just our community of individual developers, but our community of partner and developer network companies spread throughout the planet. We have over 160 companies out there right now (and those are just the ones we know about) developing solutions for their clients on the SilverStripe open source platform. And they're doing more than building commercial sites. They're contributing back to the open source product which benefits everyone. We're extremely honoured to win this award and accept it on behalf of our community."

The night was a celebration of all things open source, and it was a real honour to be there with so many other fabulous nominees and winners. It's encouraging to see that the New Zealand government has begun to adopt open source software in many of its agencies. We were also inspired by the story of Albany Senior High School, where students don’t just learn how to use programmes, they learn how to build them too.

As open source advocate (and board member for SilverStripe Ltd) Nat Torkington said, this year's awards were notable for the diversity of the winners with open source being put in the hands of school children, taxpayers, crafters, and historians. "Gone are the days when open source software existed only for open source developers.The diversity of the awards and winners show that New Zealand is holding its own with international trends. Ponoko and Ghosts in the Form of Gifts reflect a change in manufacturing, from mass production to 'my production', and the focus on education with One Laptop perChild (OLPC) and Albany Senior High School reflects the growing importance and use of open source in education around the world."

A full list of all the winners can be found on the NBR's site. And in answer to an enquiry on Twitter - yeah, we might have to extend our trophy case to hold this new award, but that's something we're happy to do.