2010 Free Software Awards announced

by John Sullivan Contributions — Published on Mar 22, 2011 06:26 PM

BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA -- Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011 -- FreeSoftware Foundation president Richard M. Stallman announced thewinners of the FSF's annual free software awards at a ceremony onSaturday, March 19th, held during the LibrePlanet 2011 conference atBunker Hill Community College.

Two awards were given: the Award for the Advancement of Free Software,and the Award for Projects of Social Benefit.

The Award for the Advancement of Free Software is given annually to anindividual who has made a great contribution to the progress anddevelopment of free software, through activities that accord with thespirit of free software.

This year, it was given to Rob Savoye. Savoye is a long-time freesoftware hacker, who has worked on GNU and other free software forover 20 years. He has contributed to dozens of projects including GCC,GDB, DejaGnu, Newlib, Libgloss, Cygwin, eCos, Expect, multiple majorGNU/Linux distributions, and One Laptop Per Child. Savoye has led theeffort to produce a free software Flash player,Gnash. This workhas enabled free software users to avoid dependency on a pervasivepiece of proprietary software. Rob is also CTO and founder of OpenMedia Now, a nonprofit dedicated to producing a freely licensed mediainfrastructure.

Savoye joins a distinguished list of previous winners:

2009 John Gilmore
2008 Wietse Venema
2007 Harald Welte
2006 Ted Ts'o
2005 Andrew Tridgell
2004 Theo de Raadt
2003 Alan Cox
2002 Lawrence Lessig
2001 Guido van Rossum
2000 Brian Paul
1999 Miguel de Icaza
1998 Larry Wall

The Award for Projects of Social Benefit recognizes a project thatintentionally and significantly benefits society through collaborationto accomplish an important social task.

This year, the award went to theTor Project. Using free software, Torhas enabled roughly 36 million people around the world to experiencefreedom of access and expression on the Internet while keeping them incontrol of their privacy and anonymity. Its network has proved pivotalin dissident movements in both Iran and more recently Egypt.

Tor Project executive director Andrew Lewman was present to accept theaward on the project's behalf.

Tor joins an impressive list of previous winners:

2009 Internet Archive
2008 Creative Commons
2007 Groklaw
2006 Sahana Disaster Management System
2005 Wikipedia

Stallman and the awards committee also gave special acknowledgment tothe work of Adrian Hands, who passed away on February 3rd of thisyear. Adrian suffered from ALS, and was unable to use a keyboard --but using a Morse code device and deep dedication, he spent some ofthe last days of his life writingcode to improve the usability ofGNOME for himself and others.

This year's award committee was: Suresh Ramasubramanian, Peter H.Salus, Wietse Venema, Raj Mathur, Hong Feng, Andrew Tridgell, JonasOberg, Vernor Vinge, Richard Stallman, Fernanda G. Weiden and HaraldWelte.

About the Free Software Foundation

The Free Software Foundation, founded in 1985, is dedicated topromoting computer users' right to use, study, copy, modify, andredistribute computer programs. The FSF promotes the development anduse of free (as in freedom) software -- particularly the GNU operatingsystem and its GNU/Linux variants -- and free documentation for freesoftware. The FSF also helps to spread awareness of the ethical andpolitical issues of freedom in the use of software, and its Web sites,located at fsf.org and gnu.org, are an important source of informationabout GNU/Linux. Donations to support the FSF's work can be made athttp://donate.fsf.org. Its headquarters are in Boston, MA, USA.