At the LibrePlanet 2020 conference, which is being held online this year due to the coronavirus pandemic, a virtual awards ceremony was held, at which winners of the annual Free Software Awards 2019, established by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and awarded to people who have made the most significant contribution to the development of free software, as well as to socially significant free projects.
Free Software Advancement and Development Award went to Jim Meiring (), since 1991 engaged in package maintenance , which includes utilities such as sort, cat, chmod, chown, chroot, cp, date, dd, echo, hostname, id, ln, ls, etc. Jim is also one of the main developers of autotools and creator of , who did a great job of unifying the code common to GNU projects.
In the category given to projects that have brought significant benefit to society and contributed to the solution of important social problems, the award was given to the Let's Encrypt project, which maintains a non-commercial community-controlled CA and provides certificates for free. Let's Encrypt had a significant impact on the transition of the Internet to the widespread use of encrypted traffic on the Web and made HTTPS available to everyone. Let's Encrypt was able to use free software and the principles of the open source movement to solve a problem that, due to the commercial interest of the existing infrastructure, seemed unsolvable. According to Josh Aas, head of Let's Encrypt, there is no freedom without privacy. As many people's lives increasingly revolve around the Web, encryption and privacy become critical to a free and healthy society.
2020 also has a new Outstanding New Contributor Contribution to Free Software, which is given to newcomers whose first contributions show a visible commitment to the free software movement. The award was received by Clarissa Lima Borges (), an engineering student from Brazil who took part in the ΠΈ yourself in the field of testing the usability of various applications for GNOME. The work was on making free software more usable by a wide range of people who need to have complete control over the applications they use and their data.
List :
- 2018 Deborah Nicholson, Director of Community Engagement, Software Freedom Conservancy;
- 2017 Karen Sandler, Director, Software Freedom Conservancy;
- 2016 Alexandre Oliva, Brazilian free software promoter and developer, founder of the Latin American Open Source Foundation, author of the Linux-Libre project (a completely free version of the Linux kernel);
- 2015 Werner Koch, creator and main developer of the GnuPG toolkit (GNU Privacy Guard);
- 2014 SΓ©bastien Jodogne, author of Orthanc, a free DICOM server for accessing computed tomography data;
- 2013 Matthew Garrett, one of the developers of the Linux kernel, who is on the technical board of the Linux Foundation, has made a significant contribution to ensuring that Linux boots on systems with UEFI Secure Boot;
- 2012 Fernando Perez, author of IPython, an interactive shell for the Python language;
- 2011 Yukihiro Matsumoto, author of the Ruby programming language. Yukihiro has been involved in the development of the GNU, Ruby and other open source projects for over 20 years;
- 2010 Rob Savoye, Gnash free Flash player project leader, GCC, GDB, DejaGnu, Newlib, Libgloss, Cygwin, eCos, Expect, founder of Open Media Now;
- 2009 John Gilmore, co-founder of the human rights organization Electronic Frontier Foundation, creator of the legendary Cypherpunks mailing list and the alt.* Usenet conference hierarchy. Founder of Cygnus Solutions, the first to provide commercial support for free software solutions. Founder of the free projects Cygwin, GNU Radio, Gnash, GNU tar, GNU UUCP and FreeS/WAN;
- 2008 Wietse Venema (a well-known computer security expert, creator of such popular projects as Postfix, TCP Wrapper, SATAN and The Coroner's Toolkit);
- 2007 Harald Welte (Architect of the OpenMoko mobile platform, one of the 5 core developers of netfilter/iptables, maintainer of the Linux kernel packet filtering subsystem, free software activist, creator of the website gpl-violations.org);
- 2006 Theodore T'so (developer of Kerberos v5, ext2/ext3 filesystems, well-known Linux kernel hacker and member of the group that developed the IPSEC specification);
- 2005 Andrew Tridgell (creator of samba and rsync projects);
- 2004 Theo de Raadt (OpenBSD project leader);
- 2003 Alan Cox (contribution to the development of the Linux kernel);
- 2002 Lawrence Lessig (open source promoter);
- 2001 Guido van Rossum (author of the Python language);
- 2000 Brian Paul (developer of the Mesa 3D library);
- 1999 Miguel de Icaza (leader of the GNOME project);
- 1998 Larry Wall (creator of the Perl language).
Organizations and communities received the award for the development of socially significant free projects: (2018)
(2017) (2016)
(2015) (2014) (2013) (2012) (2011), Tor Project (2010), Internet Archive (2009), Creative Commons (2008), Groklaw (2007), Sahana (2006) and Wikipedia (2005).
Source: opennet.ru