FSF Award for the Advancement of Free Software

From Free net encyclopedia

The Free Software Foundation Award for the Advancement of Free Software is annually presented to a person who has made a great contribution to the progress and development of free software, through activities that accord with the spirit of free software. Once an individual has been honored with an FSF award, they cannot win it again.

Since 2001, the award has been presented at Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM). The 2000 Award Ceremony was held at the Museum of Jewish Art and History in Paris, France. In 1999 it was presented in the Jacob Javits Center in New York City.

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Winners

2005: Andrew Tridgell — for his work on Samba and his packet analysis work which led to the withdrawal of gratis BitKeeper licenses, spurring the development of a free software distributed revision control system for Linux. The other finalists were Hartmut Pilch founder of the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure for his combatting of the Software Patent Directive in Europe and Theodore T'so for his filesystem development on the Linux kernel.
2004: Theo de Raadt — for his work in opening the drivers, documentation and firmware of wireless networking cards for the good of everyone. The other finalists were Andrew Tridgell for Samba and Cesar Brod for advocacy in Brazil.
2003: Alan Cox — for his work advocating the importance of software freedom, his outspoken opposition to the USA's DMCA as well as other technology control measures and his development work on the Linux kernel. The other finalists were Theo de Raadt for OpenBSD and Werner Koch for GnuPG.
2002: Lawrence Lessig — for promoting understanding of the political dimension of free software, including the idea that "code is law". The other finalists were Bruno Haible for CLISP and Theo de Raadt for OpenBSD.
2001: Guido van Rossum — for Python. The other finalists were L. Peter Deutsch for GNU Ghostscript and Andrew Tridgell for Samba.
2000: Brian Paul — for his work on the Mesa 3D Graphics Library. The other finalists were Donald Becker for his work on Linux drivers and Patrick Lenz for the open source site Freshmeat.
1999: Miguel de Icaza — for his leadership and work on the GNOME Project. The other finalists were Donald Knuth for TeX and METAFONT and John Gilmore for work done at Cygnus Solutions and his contributions to the Free Software Foundation.
1998: Larry Wall — for numerous contributions to Free Software, notably Perl. The other finalists were the Apache Project, Tim Berners-Lee, Jordan Hubbard, Ted Lemon, Eric S. Raymond, Henry Spencer.