WordPress can put yet another trophy on its mantle with a 2011 bOSSie award by InfoWorld within the Best Open Source Applications category. Confusingly, Drupal also won an award within the same category. Are the two pieces of software so different that they can be considered seperate entities with regards to what they enable the end user to accomplish? Don’t they both accomplish the same task but in their own way?

As an aside to open source software, I thought this quote on TechnewsWorld made a good point.

“I had a client that was unhappy because the robot he is helping design for a NASA competition at the local college just doesn’t have the level of lighting realism he wanted with Solidworks,” hairyfeet added. “So I just sent him to this link on the Blender wiki and voila! Thanks to FOSS and a volunteer that wrote the import scripts, he is happily having his robot rendering in photo realism by Blender.”

That, in fact, “is what FOSS should be about — not about politics or factions, or all the GPL vs. BSD flamewars, but ‘can this software make someone’s day easier and/or better?’” hairyfeet concluded. “If it does, that is what makes good software to me.”