Winners of Annual Award for Contributions to Free Software Development Announced by Open Source Foundation

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An awards ceremony took place at the LibrePlanet 2024 conference, where announced laureates of the annual awardFree Software Awards 2023“, established by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and awarded to people who have made the most significant contributions to the development of free software, as well as socially significant free projects. The winners received commemorative records and certificates (the FSF award does not imply any monetary reward).

The award for the promotion and development of free software was given to Bruno Haible, who maintains the project Gnulib, which develops a collection of generic code for sharing among various GNU packages. Bruno is also one of the creators CLISPan implementation of the LISP language, and a contributor to the development of GNU M4, Automake, libiconv and gettext.

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In the category given to projects that have brought significant benefits to society and contributed to the solution of important social problems, the award was awarded to a French project code.gouv.frwhich helps government agencies in the transition to the use of free and open source software, and also supports the process of opening the code of projects developed in government agencies.

In the Outstanding New Contribution to Free Software category, which recognizes newcomers whose first contributions have demonstrated a significant commitment to the free software movement, the award went to Nick Logozzo (Nick Logozzo), student at State University of New York at Stony Brook developing a suite of applications Nickvision for GNOME, written in C# using GTK 4 and libadwaita. Among Nick's projects is the program Parabolic for downloading video/audio from the Web and viewing YouTube without executing JavaScript code (wired over the yt-dlp utility), music tagging system Taggerfinancial management system Denarosound visualizer
Cavalier And FlatpakGeneratora Flatpak file generator for C# projects.

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List past winners:

  • 2022 Eli Zaretskii, one of the GNU Emacs maintainers.
  • 2021 Paul Eggert, responsible for maintaining the time zone database used on most Unix systems and all Linux distributions.
  • 2020 Bradley Kuhn (Bradley M. Kuhn), executive director and co-founder of the human rights organization Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC).
  • 2019 Jim Meyering, maintainer of the GNU Coreutils package since 1991, one of the main developers of autotools and creator of Gnulib.
  • 2018 Deborah Nicholson, Director of Community Engagement at the Software Freedom Conservancy;
  • 2017 Karen Sandler, director of the Software Freedom Conservancy;
  • 2016 Alexandre Oliva, Brazilian popularizer and developer of free software, founder of the Latin American Open Thanks for reading 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 (GNU Privacy Guard) toolkit;
  • 2014 Sébastien Jodogne, author of Orthanc, a free DICOM server for providing access to computed tomography data;
  • 2013 Matthew Garrett, co-developer of the Linux kernel and a member of the technical council of the Linux Foundation, made significant contributions to making Linux boot 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 GNU, Ruby and other open source projects for 20 years;
  • 2010 Rob Savoye, leader of the project to create the free Flash player Gnash, participant in the development of 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 alt.* hierarchy of Usenet conferences. Founder of Cygnus Solutions, the first company 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 expert in the field of computer security, 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 main developers of netfilter/iptables, maintainer of the packet filtering subsystem of the Linux kernel, free software activist, creator of the site gpl-violations.org);
  • 2006 Theodore T'so (developer of Kerberos v5, ext2/ext3 file systems, famous Linux kernel hacker and member of the team that developed the IPSEC specification);
  • 2005 Andrew Tridgell (creator of the samba and rsync projects);
  • 2004 Theo de Raadt (OpenBSD project manager);
  • 2003 Alan Cox (contribution to the development of the Linux kernel);
  • 2002 Lawrence Lessig (open source popularizer);
  • 2001 Guido van Rossum (author of the Python language);
  • 2000 Brian Paul (Mesa 3D library developer);
  • 1999 Miguel de Icaza (GNOME project leader);
  • 1998 Larry Wall (creator of the Perl language).

The following organizations and communities received the award for the development of socially significant free projects: 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).

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