The European Open Source Academy (EOSA) has awarded Greg Kroah-Hartman the 2026 Excellence in Open Source Award, presented by the European community for outstanding contributions to open source development. Greg is responsible for maintaining the stable and staging branches of the Linux kernel, maintains 16 kernel subsystems, including USB, TTY, and the Driver core, and is the creator of openSUSE Tumbleweed, udev, and the Linux driver project. Greg has recently resided in the Netherlands.
In addition to the main prize, 4 special awards (Special Recognitions) were established, awarded to 5 participants:
- Business and Impact - Frank Karlitschek, creator of the NextCloud cloud platform.
- Community Impact - Roberto Di Cosmo, Italian computer scientist and creator of the Software Heritage source code archive.
- Community Impact - Stefano Zacchiroli, French researcher and professor, co-founder and scientific director of the Software Heritage archive, three-time Debian Project Leader, and a member of the board of directors of the Open Source Initiative (OSI).
- Skills and Education - Matthew Venn, founder of the TinyTapeout project, which helps with the fabrication of open-source chips.
- Advocacy and Awareness - Jenny Molloy, Group Leader at the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB), founder of the Reagent Collaboration Network, co-author of the Open Material Transfer Agreement, co-founder of the Open Science Hardware Foundation, and advocate for open science.
The European Open Source Academy was created with the support of the European Commission to promote and recognize outstanding individuals and organizations working on open source software and hardware development in Europe. Its goal is to promote the benefits of open source projects, foster collaboration, and champion the societal and economic value of open source software and hardware technologies. The organization is in the process of being transformed into an independent, non-profit foundation registered in Belgium.
The award was presented by Daniel Stenberg, President of the European Open Source Academy, author of the curl utility, and member of the IETF working groups developing the HTTP and QUIC protocols. Besides Daniel, the following are members of the Academy:
- Jaromil Denis Roio (author of the first free LiveCD),
- Catharina Maracke (led the adaptation of Creative Commons licenses to the laws of different countries),
- Isabel Drost-Fromm (Apache Software Foundation Fellow and co-founder of the InnerSource Commons Foundation),
- David Cuartielles (founder of Arduino),
- Jean-Baptiste Kempf (VideoLAN community leader),
- Dries Buytaert (founder of Drupal),
- Amandine Le Pape (co-founder of Element, a communications platform that promotes the Matrix protocol),
- Javier Serrano (creator of the Open Hardware Repository and co-author of the CERN Open Hardware Licence),
- Robert Kaye (founder of MusicBrainz and head of the MetaBrainz Foundation),
- Lydia Pintscher (head of Wikimedia Germany).
Source: opennet.ru
