Awards for Open Source Contributions

In this article, we have mentioned the major Awards you can win for your Open Source Contributions and get recognized by major companies like Microsoft (GitHub), Google, IBM (RedHat) and others.

You can win the following awards for your Open Source Contributions (can be code or community building):

• GitHub Star Award
• Women in Open Source Award
• MLH Open Source Award
• O'Reilly Open Source Award

You shall apply for these and win the prestigious awards. Give it a shot.

GitHub Star Award

This is how a GitHub Star Award looks like:

GitHub Star Award

• Awarded by: GitHub (Parent Company: Microsoft)
• Nomination: Anyone
• Time for Award: Annually once
• Criteria: maintaining open-source projects; educate, inspire and influence developer communities;
• Award Page: stars.github.com

GitHub Star Award is a prestigious award for developers involved in Open Source. It can be awarded to anyone (not even directly involved with GitHub) and has a relatively higher bar compared to other awards.

GitHub is at the forefront of Open Source Communities so this award is very valuable. The winner receive the following items:

• GitHub Star Award (the framed star)
• Goodies like a set of t-shirts, stickers, ear ring
• Chances to speak and attend GitHub events

Women in Open Source Award

• Awarded by: RedHat (Parent Company: IBM)
• Nomination: By RedHat community
• Time for Award: Annually once
• Criteria: Open-Source Contributions,
• Award Page: redhat.com/en/about/women-in-open-source

This award is presented by RedHat to support Open-Source contributors involved in their activities. Several Students are awarded with this. Every year 2 developers while 10 are recognized as finalists. They are awarded with two types of the award: Community and Academic Award.

One of our Interns, Atibhi Agrawal from International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore has been a finalist for the "Women in Open Source Award - Academic" in 2020.

MLH Open Source Award

• Awarded by: Major League Hacking (MLH)
• Nomination: Anyone can nominate anyone (even themself)
• Time for Award: October every year
• Criteria: Open Source Code Contributions by Individuals, Teams or Organizations
• Award Page: fellowship.mlh.io/opensourceawards

This award to presented by Major League Hacking (MLH) (a community of beginners) and is usually, for beginners.

There are three categories of this award:

• Inclusion and Diversity award: for supporting and building an open-source community
• Next Generation Award: a program focused on bringing new contributors in future
• Community Award: Effort to build a community

O'Reilly Open Source Award

• Awarded by: O'Reilly; Google supported till 2009
• Nomination: By Panel members of O'Reilly
• Time for Award: Annually once.
• Criteria: Innovative Open Source project
• Award Page: developers.google.com/open-source/osa/
• Started: 2005

This award is a prestigious award but is given out to prominent figures in Open Source communities who are behind major open-source projects. Having started in 2005, the award is one of the earliest in this field.

This is a major award. Some of the recent winners were involved with MySQL, PostgreSQL, Moodle and others.

With this article, you must have a clear idea of the awards you can win. Keep contributing to open-source.