The winners of the annual Free Software Awards 2024 have been announced. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) recognizes individuals who have made significant contributions to free software and socially significant free projects. The winners received certificates of recognition (the FSF awards do not include monetary compensation).
The award for the promotion and development of free software was received by Andy Wingo, one of the maintainers of the GNU Guile project, which develops a free implementation of the functional programming language Scheme. Guile is the official extension development language for the GNU operating system and is used in projects such as the GNU Guix package manager and the GDB debugger.
In the category, which recognizes projects that have brought significant benefits to society and contributed to the resolution of important social issues, the award went to the Govdirectory project, which maintains a publicly accessible directory of contact information, social networks, websites, and services through which citizens can contact government agencies in various countries (e.g., Latvia, Russia, Ukraine) on issues of interest to them.
In the Outstanding New Contributor to Free Software category, which recognizes newcomers whose initial contributions demonstrate a significant commitment to the free software movement, Alx Sa won for his active participation in the development of the free graphics editor GIMP (in three years of his participation in the project, he rose to 4th place in the number of commits in GIMP).
List of past winners:
- 2023 Bruno Haible, maintainer of the Gnulib project.
- 2022 Eli Zaretskii, one of the GNU Emacs maintainers.
- 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: code.gouv.fr (2023), GNU Jami (2022), 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
