The annual Open Source Viewers Choice — better known as the SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards — have been underway since early June, and the results are finally in. Plenty of big names top the list, but for some, one has to wonder if it's more dubious than a distinction.

Nominees for the Community Choice Awards are submitted by ordinary users, choosing any Open Source project they want — a change for this year, as previous years have required projects to be hosted at sourceforge.net — and are then submitted to the larger community for voting. This years winners included a plethora of familiar faces, including OpenOffice, which won three awards: Best Project, — the CCA-equivalent of Best Picture — Best Project for the Enterprise, and Best Project for Educators. Most Likely to Change the World went to the beloved and already world-changing Linux, while phpMyAdmin took both Most Likely to Be the Next $1B Acquisition and Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins, matched with Notepad++ as Best Tool or Utility for Developers. Best New Project went to E-Commerce offering Magento, Best Project for Multimedia to the ever-popular VLC, and Best Project for Gamers was bestowed upon media center/jukebox XBMC.

Two of the distinctions, however, weren't so favorable — though we admit that ignoring the reality of today's software world would only be Pollyannaesque. The title Most Likely to Be Ambiguously and Baselessly Accused of Patent Violation fell to WINE, oddly enough, a project ever-diligent to avoid such problems. P2P client eMule fared no better, taking home the troubling trophy for Most Likely to Get Users Sued by Anachronistic Industry Associations Defending Dead Business Models. Here's hoping that all of the former predictions, and none of the latter, will come true.

LinuxJournal.com's very own Katherine Druckman — webmistress extraordinaire — was live on the scene for the 2008 SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards, and has provided Breaking News with these as-it-happened shots:

Katherine informs us that in addition to the Awards show, there were other amenities available, perhaps most interesting among them a free tattoo parlor for convention goers. No word on what, if any, tattoo may now adorn everyone's favorite gadget-guy, Shawn Powers.