At this year's OSCON (O'Reilly Open Source Convention) event that took place last week in San Jose, California, Google announced the winners of its Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards, which are given every year to the top contributors in various IT-related domains. Individuals that have shown exceptional dedication, leadership, innovation and have been actively contributing to open source development were rewarded in a ceremony in front of their peers.

The fifth edition of the gala took place on the second day of the OSCON convention and was sponsored by Google. The winners received a glass statue and a 5,000-dollar cash prize. As in the past, the nominations were opened to the development community two months before the ceremony. Sorting from hundreds of proposed candidates, the award committee chose five winners.

The award for the Best Open Source Database Hacker went to Brian Aker for his work on the MySQL and Drizzle projects. Bruce Momjian won that for the Best Database Jedi Master, for his work and contributions to PostgreSQL.

For the work on the micro-blogging platform Laconicaand that on the identi.ca website, Evan Prodromou won the award for the Best Social-Networking Hacker. Penny Leach won the Best Education Hacker award for important contributions to the Moodle Course Management System and the Mahara e-portfolio project.

Last but not least, an award winner is also Clay Johnson, for his work on Sunlight Labs, a platform that turns government information into useful e-information. He won the Best Community Builder trophy.

The committee was formed by 23 important figures in the open source development community. They are past winners of the awards and CEOs or important project managers in big-name companies like Mozilla, Intel, Google, O'Reilly, Sun Microsystems, IBM, etc.

Even if not all of them are popular or well-known in the web-development community, these winners have a bright and shiny future ahead of them. To outline the importance of these awards, previous winners include the likes of David Heinemeier Hansson (the Ruby on Rails project), Gervase Markham (Firefox), Angela Byron (Drupal CMS) or Andrew Tridgell (Samba and Rsync). The complete list of past winners can be found here.

Watch video highlights from the award ceremony.