I'd never heard of IT4Communities before - now I'm signed up as a volunteer! Thanks for bringing this to our attention.

I've been working on an IT4Communities project for some time and it's been very interesting and rewarding. It's nice to see El Reg being involved.

@AC 09:08: it4c is all about helping charities so the awards are for projects they have been involved with and don't necessarilly have anything to do with open source. On the other hand, charities are very open to the concept. When starting on the project I currently work on, I asked the charity if they would agree to me releasing anything I do for them as open source and they were very receptive to the idea. So when I think it can be useful to others, I will release it under an open source license. Conversely, for obvious cost reasons, a lot of charity projects are done using open source software which in turn is a good way to find bugs and report them to the project.

Maybe, but that's missing the point a bit - open source =/= charity.

Admittedly charities could use open source software, but they'll still need the expertise to install and maintain it.

Oh and in my experience charities are less keen on open source than commercial businesses - because they can get the paid-for equivalent at massive discounts, sometimes free. (Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, etc).

There's a bloke on a local freecycle group to me who has fixed / built, and given away over 144 recycled PCs...