FSF Free Software Awards

Presentation ceremonies

In 1999 it was presented in the Jacob Javits Center in New York City. The 2000 Award Ceremony was held at the Museum of Jewish Art and History in Paris. From 2001 to 2005, the award has been presented in Brussels at the Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM). Since 2006, the awards have been presented at the FSF's annual members meeting in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Advancement of Free Software award

This is annually presented by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) to a person whom it deems to have made a great contribution to the progress and development of free software, through activities that accord with the spirit of free software.

Winners

Source: Award for the Advancement of Free Software

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, and Henry Spencer.

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.

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.

2001 Guido van Rossum

for Python. The other finalists were L. Peter Deutsch for GNU Ghostscript and Andrew Tridgell for Samba.

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.

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.

2004 Theo de Raadt

for his campaigning against binary blobs, and the opening of 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.

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 git, a free software distributed revision control system for the Linux kernel. 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 Ts'o for his Linux kernel filesystem development.

2006 Theodore Ts'o

for his work on the Linux kernel and his roles as a project leader in the development of Kerberos and ONC RPC. The other finalists were Wietse Venema for his creation of the Postfix mailserver and his work on security tools, and Yukihiro Matsumoto for his work in designing the Ruby programming language.

2007 Harald Welte

for his work on GPL enforcement (Gpl-violations.org) and Openmoko

2008 Wietse Venema

For his "significant and wide-ranging technical contributions to network security, and his creation of the Postfix email server."

2009 John Gilmore

For his "many contributions and long term commitment to the free software movement."

2010 Rob Savoye

For his work on Gnash

2011 Yukihiro Matsumoto

the creator of Ruby, for his work on GNU, Ruby, and other free software for over 20 years.

2012 Fernando Pérez

for his work on IPython, and his role in the scientific Python community.

2013 Matthew Garrett

for his work to support software freedom in relation to Secure Boot, UEFI, and the Linux kernel

2014 Sébastien Jodogne

for his work on easing the exchange of medical images and developing Orthanc.

2015 Werner Koch

the founder and driving force behind GnuPG. GnuPG is the de facto tool for encrypted communication. Society needs more than ever to advance free encryption technology.

Social benefit award

Source: The Award for Projects of Social Benefit

The Free Software Award for Projects of Social Benefit is an annual award granted by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). In announcing the award, the FSF explained that:

This award is presented to the project or team responsible for applying free software, or the ideas of the free software movement, in a project that intentionally and significantly benefits society in other aspects of life.

According to Richard Stallman, President of FSF, the award was inspired by the Sahana project which was developed, and was used, for organising the transfer of aid to tsunami victims in Sri Lanka after the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake. The developers indicated that they hope to adapt it to aid for other future disasters.

This is the second annual award created by FSF. The first was the Award for the Advancement of Free Software (AAFS).

Winners

The award was first awarded in 2005, and the recipients have been:

2005 Wikipedia

The Free Encyclopedia

2006 The Sahana FOSS Disaster Management System

"An entirely volunteer effort to create technology for managing large-scale relief efforts"

2007 Groklaw

"An invaluable source of legal and technical information for software developers, lawyers, law professors, and historians"

2008 Creative Commons

"[For] foster[ing] a growing body of creative, educational and scientific works that can be shared and built upon by others [and] work[ing] to raise awareness of the harm inflicted by increasingly restrictive copyright regimes."

2009 Internet Archive

For collecting freely available information, archiving the web, collaborating with libraries, and creating free software to make information available to the public.

2010 Tor

For writing software to help privacy online.

2011 GNU Health

For their work with health professionals around the world to improve the lives of the underprivileged.

2012 OpenMRS

"A free software medical record system for developing countries. OpenMRS is now in use around the world, including South Africa, Kenya, Rwanda, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Uganda, Tanzania, Haiti, India, China, United States, Pakistan, the Philippines, and many other places."

2013 GNOME Foundation's Outreach Program for Women

OPW's work benefits society, "addressing gender discrimination by empowering women to develop leadership and development skills in a society which runs on technology".

2014 Reglue

which donates refurbished GNU/Linux computers to underprivileged children in Austin, TX.

2015 Library Freedom Project

a partnership among librarians, technologists, attorneys, and privacy advocates which aims to make real the promise of intellectual freedom in libraries. By teaching librarians about surveillance threats, privacy rights and responsibilities, and digital tools to stop surveillance, the project hopes to create a privacy-centric paradigm shift in libraries and the local communities they serve.

Award Committee

1998: Peter H. Salus, Scott Christley, Rich Morin, Adam Richter, Richard Stallman, and Vernor Vinge

1999: Peter H. Salus, no further details found

2000: no details found

2001 The selection committee included: Miguel de Icaza, Ian Murdock, Eric S. Raymond, Peter H. Salus, Vernor Vinge, and Larry Wall

2002 The selection committee included: Enrique A. Chaparro, Frederic Couchet, Hong Feng, Miguel de Icaza, Raj Mathur, Frederick Noronha, Jonas Öberg, Eric S. Raymond, Guido van Rossum, Peter H. Salus, Suresh Ramasubramanian, and Larry Wall

2003 The selection committee included: Enrique A. Chaparro, Frederic Couchet, Miguel de Icaza, Raj Mathur, Frederick Noronha, Jonas Öberg, Bruce Perens, Peter H. Salus, Suresh Ramasubramanian, Richard Stallman, and Vernor Vinge

2004: Suresh Ramasubramanian, Raj Mathur, Frederick Noronha, Hong Feng, Frederic Couchet, Enrique A. Chaparro, Vernor Vinge, Larry Wall, Alan Cox, Peter H Salus, Richard Stallman

2005: Peter H. Salus (chair), Richard Stallman, Alan Cox, Lawrence Lessig, Guido van Rossum, Frederic Couchet, Jonas Öberg, Hong Feng, Bruce Perens, Raj Mathur, Suresh Ramasubramanian, Enrique A. Chaparro, Ian Murdock

2006: Peter H. Salus (chair), Richard Stallman, Andrew Tridgell, Alan Cox, Lawrence Lessig, Vernor Vinge, Frederic Couchet, Jonas Öberg, Hong Feng, Raj Mathur, Suresh Ramasubramanian

2008: Suresh Ramasubramanian (Chair), Peter H. Salus, Raj Mathur, Hong Feng, Andrew Tridgell, Jonas Öberg, Vernor Vinge, Richard Stallman, and Fernanda G. Weiden.

2009: Suresh Ramasubramanian (Chair), Peter H. Salus, Lawrence Lessig, Raj Mathur, Wietse Venema, Hong Feng, Andrew Tridgell, Jonas Öberg, Vernor Vinge, Richard Stallman, Fernanda G. Weiden and Harald Welte.

2010: Suresh Ramasubramanian (Chair), Peter H. Salus, Raj Mathur, Wietse Venema, Hong Feng, Andrew Tridgell, Jonas Öberg, Vernor Vinge, Richard Stallman, Fernanda G. Weiden and Harald Welte.

2011: Suresh Ramasubramanian (Chair), Peter H. Salus, Raj Mathur, Wietse Venema, Hong Feng, Andrew Tridgell, Jonas Öberg, Vernor Vinge, Richard Stallman, Fernanda G. Weiden and Harald Welte.

2012: Suresh Ramasubramanian (Chair), Peter H. Salus, Raj Mathur, Wietse Venema, Hong Feng, Andrew Tridgell, Jonas Öberg, Vernor Vinge, Richard Stallman, Fernanda G. Weiden and Harald Welte.

2013: Suresh Ramasubramanian (Chair), Wietse Venema, Hong Feng, Andrew Tridgell, Jonas Öberg, Vernor Vinge, Richard Stallman, Fernanda G. Weiden, Rob Savoye and Harald Welte.

2014: Suresh Ramasubramanian (Chair), Marina Zhurakhinskaya, Matthew Garrett, Rob Savoye, Wietse Venema, Richard Stallman, Vernor Vinge, Hong Feng, Fernanda G. Weiden, Harald Welte, Jonas Öberg, and Yukihiro Matsumoto.