Free Software Foundation announces the winners of the annual award for contribution to the development of free software

The LibrePlanet 2023 conference hosted an awards ceremony that announced the winners of the annual Free Software Awards 2022, 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 socially significant free projects. The winners received commemorative records and certificates (the FSF award does not imply a monetary reward).

The award for the promotion and development of free software went to Eli Zaretskii, one of the maintainers of GNU Emacs, who has been involved in the development of the project for more than 30 years. Eli Zaretsky has also been involved in the development of GNU Texinfo, GDB, GNU Make and GNU Grep.

In the category given to projects that have brought significant benefits to society and contributed to the solution of important social problems, the award was given to the GNU Jami project (formerly known as Ring and SFLphone), which develops a decentralized communication platform for both large group communication and individual calls with a high level of privacy and security. The platform supports direct connection between users (P2P) using end-to-end encryption.

The Outstanding New Contributor Contribution to Free Software category, which honors newcomers whose first contributions show a visible commitment to the free software movement, was awarded to Tad (SkewedZeppelin), the leader of the DivestOS project, which maintains a fork of the LineageOS mobile platform stripped of non-free components. Previously, Tad was also involved in the development of the completely free Android firmware Replicant.

List of past winners:

• 2021 Paul Eggert, responsible for maintaining the timezone database used by most Unix systems and all Linux distributions.
• 2020 Bradley M. Kuhn, Executive Director and founding member of the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC).
• 2019 Jim Meyering, maintainer of the GNU Coreutils package since 1991, co-author of autotools and creator of Gnulib.
• 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 Sébastien 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).

The following organizations and communities received the award for the development of socially significant free projects: SecuRepairs (2021), CiviCRM (2020), Let's Encrypt (2019), OpenStreetMap (2018), Public Lab (2017), SecureDrop (2016), Library Freedom Project (2015) , Reglue (2014), GNOME Outreach Program for Women (2013), OpenMRS (2012), GNU Health (2011), Tor Project (2010), Internet Archive (2009), Creative Commons (2008), Groklaw (2007), Sahana (2006) and Wikipedia (2005).

Source: opennet.ru