Open Source Awards 2011 launched - "Recognizing excellence in open source"

The 'Packt Open Source Awards 2011' 

have been announced. Formerly the Open Source CMS Award, the contest has been running since 2006 and, according to a press release sent to .net, is "regarded as one of the most established platforms for recognising excellence amongst Open Source Software".

The aim of the Open Source Awards is to encourage, support and reward open source projects, in part through cash prizes, which have topped $100,000 since 2006.

This year, the categories up for awards are: Open Source CMS, Open Source Mobile Toolkits and Libraries, Most Promising Open Source Project, Open Source Business Applications, Open Source JavaScript Libraries, and Open Source Multimedia Software.

To identify excellence, the public votes for finalists within each category are combined with ratings from a panel of judges. Packt itself notes that it has no input nor say in the finalists nor the winners of any award category.

Voting for 2011's awards began yesterday and closes on 31 October. Winners will be announced in early November.

Further information can be found on the Packt Open Source Awards 2011 website, which also provides explanations regarding eligibility for each of the categories.