Free Software Foundation The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman on October 4, 1985, to support the free software movement, with the organization's preference for software being distributed under copyleft (" ...

(FSF) grants two annual awards. Since 1998, FSF has granted the award for Advancement of Free Software and since 2005, also the Free Software Award for Projects of Social Benefit.

Presentation ceremonies

In 1999 it was presented in the

Jacob Javits Center The Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, commonly known as the Javits Center, is a large convention center on Eleventh Avenue between 34th Street and 38th Street in Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan, New York City. It was designed by architect James I ...

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...

. The 2000 Award Ceremony was held at the Museum of Jewish Art and History in

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), ma ...

. From 2001 to 2005, the award has been presented in

Brussels Brussels (french: Bruxelles or ; nl, Brussel ), officially the Brussels-Capital Region (All text and all but one graphic show the English name as Brussels-Capital Region.) (french: link=no, Région de Bruxelles-Capitale; nl, link=no, Bruss ...

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

(FSF) to a person whom it deems to have made a great contribution to the progress and development of

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

, through activities that accord with the spirit of free software.

Winners

Source
Award for the Advancement of Free Software
;1998

Larry Wall Larry Arnold Wall (born September 27, 1954) is an American computer programmer and author. He created the Perl programming language. Personal life Wall grew up in Los Angeles and then Bremerton, Washington, before starting higher education at ...

: for numerous contributions to Free Software, notably

Perl Perl is a family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it also referred to its redesigned "sister language", Perl 6, before the latter's name was offic ...

. The other finalists were the Apache Project, Tim Berners-Lee, Jordan Hubbard, Ted Lemon, Eric S. Raymond, and

Henry Spencer Henry Spencer (born 1955) is a Canadian computer programmer and space enthusiast. He wrote "regex", a widely used software library for regular expressions, and co-wrote C News, a Usenet server program. He also wrote ''The Ten Commandments for C ...

. ;1999

Miguel de Icaza Miguel de Icaza (born November 23, 1972) is a Mexican programmer, best known for starting the GNOME, Mono, and Xamarin projects. Biography Early years De Icaza was born in Mexico City and studied Mathematics at the National Autonomous University ...

: for his leadership and work on the GNOME Project. The other finalists were

Donald Knuth Donald Ervin Knuth ( ; born January 10, 1938) is an American computer scientist, mathematician, and professor emeritus at Stanford University. He is the 1974 recipient of the ACM Turing Award, informally considered the Nobel Prize of computer sc ...

for

TeX Tex may refer to: People and fictional characters * Tex (nickname), a list of people and fictional characters with the nickname * Joe Tex (1933–1982), stage name of American soul singer Joseph Arrington Jr. Entertainment * ''Tex'', the Italian ...

and METAFONT and

John Gilmore John Gilmore may refer to: * John Gilmore (activist) (born 1955), co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Cygnus Solutions * John Gilmore (musician) (1931–1995), American jazz saxophonist * John Gilmore (representative) (1780–1845 ...

for work done at

Cygnus Solutions Cygnus Solutions, originally Cygnus Support, was founded in 1989 by John Gilmore, Michael Tiemann and David Henkel-Wallace to provide commercial support for free software. Its tagline was: ''Making free software affordable''. For years, employ ...

and his contributions to the Free Software Foundation. ;2000 Brian Paul : for his work on the

Mesa 3D Mesa, also called Mesa3D and The Mesa 3D Graphics Library, is an open source implementation of OpenGL, Vulkan, and other graphics API specifications. Mesa translates these specifications to vendor-specific graphics hardware drivers. Its most ...

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 Guido van Rossum (; born 31 January 1956) is a Dutch programmer best known as the creator of the Python programming language, for which he was the "benevolent dictator for life" (BDFL) until he stepped down from the position on 12 July 2018 ...

: for

Python Python may refer to: Snakes * Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia ** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia * Python (mythology), a mythical serpent Computing * Python (pro ...

. The other finalists were

L. Peter Deutsch L Peter Deutsch (born Laurence Peter Deutsch on August 7, 1946, in Boston, Massachusetts) is the founder of Aladdin Enterprises and creator of Ghostscript, a free software PostScript and Portable Document Format, PDF interpreter. Deutsch's othe ...

for GNU

Ghostscript Ghostscript is a suite of software based on an interpreter for Adobe Systems' PostScript and Portable Document Format (PDF) page description languages. Its main purposes are the rasterization or rendering of such page description language file ...

and Andrew Tridgell for Samba. ;2002

Lawrence Lessig Lester Lawrence Lessig III (born June 3, 1961) is an American academic, attorney, and political activist. He is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the former director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard ...

: 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 In computing, CLISP is an implementation of the programming language Common Lisp originally developed by Bruno Haible and Michael Stoll for the Atari ST. Today it supports the Unix and Microsoft Windows operating systems. CLISP includes an in ...

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 The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a 1998 United States copyright law that implements two 1996 treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). It criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or ...

as well as other technology control measures, and his development work on the Linux kernel. The other finalists were

Theo de Raadt Theo de Raadt (; ; born May 19, 1968) is a South African-born software engineer who lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He is the founder and leader of the OpenBSD and OpenSSH projects and was also a founding member of NetBSD. In 2004, De Raadt ...

for OpenBSD and Werner Koch for

GnuPG GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG or GPG) is a free-software replacement for Symantec's PGP cryptographic software suite. The software is compliant with RFC 4880, the IETF standards-track specification of OpenPGP. Modern versions of PGP are interoperabl ...

. ;2004

: for his campaigning against

binary blobs In the context of free and open-source software, proprietary software only available as a binary executable is referred to as a blob or binary blob. The term usually refers to a device driver module loaded into the kernel of an open-source oper ...

, 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 Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...

. ;2005

Andrew Tridgell Andrew "Tridge" Tridgell (born 28 February 1967) is an Australian computer programmer. He is the author of and a contributor to the Samba file server, and co-inventor of the rsync algorithm. He has analysed complex proprietary protocols and ...

: for his work on Samba and his

BitKeeper BitKeeper is a software tool for distributed revision control of computer source code. Originally developed as proprietary software by BitMover Inc., a privately held company based in Los Gatos, California, it was released as open-source softwar ...

client which led to the withdrawal of gratis BitKeeper licenses, spurring the development of

git Git () is a distributed version control system: tracking changes in any set of files, usually used for coordinating work among programmers collaboratively developing source code during software development. Its goals include speed, data in ...

, a

distributed

revision control In software engineering, version control (also known as revision control, source control, or source code management) is a class of systems responsible for managing changes to computer programs, documents, large web sites, or other collections o ...

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 Theodore (Ted) Yue Tak Ts'o (曹子德) (born 1968) is an American software engineer mainly known for his contributions to the Linux kernel, in particular his contributions to file systems. He is the Secondary developer and maintainer of e2fs ...

: 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 Wietse Zweitze Venema (born 1951) is a Kingdom of the Netherlands, Dutch programmer and physicist best known for writing the Postfix (software), Postfix email system. He also wrote TCP Wrapper and collaborated with Dan Farmer to produce the comp ...

for his creation of the Postfix mailserver and his work on security tools, and

Yukihiro Matsumoto , also known as Matz, is a Japanese computer scientist and software programmer best known as the chief designer of the Ruby programming language and its original reference implementation, Matz's Ruby Interpreter (MRI). His demeanor has brough ...

for his work in designing the

Ruby A ruby is a pinkish red to blood-red colored gemstone, a variety of the mineral corundum ( aluminium oxide). Ruby is one of the most popular traditional jewelry gems and is very durable. Other varieties of gem-quality corundum are called ...

programming language. ;2007

Harald Welte Harald Welte, also known as LaForge, is a German programmer. Welte is the founder of the free software project Osmocom and was formerly involved in the netfilter/iptables and Openmoko projects. He is a member of the Chaos Computer Club. Bi ...

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

Openmoko Openmoko is a discontinued project to create a family of Open-source model, open source mobile phones, including the hardware specification, the operating system (Openmoko Linux), and actual smartphone development implementation like the Neo 19 ...

;2008

: For his "significant and wide-ranging technical contributions to network security, and his creation of the Postfix email server." ;2009

: For his "many contributions and long term commitment to the free software movement." ;2010

Rob Savoye Rob Savoye is the primary developer of Gnash. He is a developer for the GNU Project, having worked on Debian, Red Hat and dozens of other free/open source software projects. He was among the first employees of Cygnus Support, which was sold to ...

: For his work on Gnash ::Additionally, a special mention was made to honor the memory and contribution o
Adrian Hands
who used a morse input device to code and successfully submit a GNOME patch, three days before he died from ALS. ;2011

: the creator of

, for his work on

GNU GNU () is an extensive collection of free software (383 packages as of January 2022), which can be used as an operating system or can be used in parts with other operating systems. The use of the completed GNU tools led to the family of operat ...

, Ruby, and other

for over 20 years. ;2012 Fernando Pérez : for his work on IPython, and his role in the scientific Python community. ;2014 Sébastien Jodogne : for his work on easing the exchange of medical images and developing

Orthanc In J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy writings, Isengard () is a large fortress in Nan Curunír, the Wizard's Vale, in the western part of Middle-earth. In the fantasy world, the name of the fortress is described as a translation of Angrenost, a word ...

.Sébastien Jodogne, ReGlue are Free Software Award (2014) winners
FSF ;2015 Werner Koch : the founder and driving force behind

. GnuPG is the de facto tool for encrypted communication. Society needs more than ever to advance free encryption technology.Library Freedom Project and Werner Koch are 2015 Free Software Awards winners
FSF ;2016 Alexandre Oliva : for his work in promoting Free Software and the involvement in projects like the maintenance of

linux-libre Linux-libre is a modified version of the Linux kernel that contains no binary blobs, obfuscated code, or code released under proprietary licenses. In the Linux kernel, they are mostly used for proprietary firmware images. While generally r ...

and the reverse engineer of the proprietary software used by Brazilian citizens to submit their taxes to the government.SecureDrop and Alexandre Oliva are 2016 Free Software Awards winners
FSF ;2017

Karen Sandler Karen Sandler is the executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy, former executive director of the GNOME Foundation, an attorney, and former general counsel of the Software Freedom Law Center. Work in Free Software As of March 2014, Sa ...

: for her dedication to Free Software as the former Executive Director of GNOME Foundation, current Executive Director of Software Freedom Conservancy, co-organizer of

Outreachy Outreachy (previously the Free and Open Source Software Outreach Program for Women) is a program that organizes three-month paid internships with free and open-source software projects for people who are typically underrepresented in those projec ...

, and through years of pro bono legal advice.Public Lab and Karen Sandler are 2017 Free Software Awards winners
FSF. . ;2018 Deborah Nicholson : Deborah was the director of community operations at the Software Freedom Conservancy, Stallman praised her body of work and her unremitting and widespread contributions to the free software community. "Deborah continuously reaches out to, and engages, new audiences with her message on the need for free software in any version of the future. "OpenStreetMap and Deborah Nicholson win 2018 FSF Awards
FSF ;2019 Jim Meyering : a prolific free software programmer, maintainer and writer, having contributed significantly to the

GNU Core Utilities The GNU Core Utilities or coreutils is a package of GNU software containing implementations for many of the basic tools, such as cat, ls, and rm, which are used on Unix-like operating systems. In September 2002, the ''GNU coreutils'' were ...

, GNU Autotools and Gnulib.Let's Encrypt, Jim Meyering, and Clarissa Lima Borges receive FSF's 2019 Free Software Awards
FSF ;2020 Bradley M. Kuhn :for his work in enforcing the GNU General Public License (GPL) and promoting copyleft through his position at Software Freedom Conservancy. ;2021 Paul Eggert : a computer scientist who teaches in the Department of Computer Science at the

University of California The University of California (UC) is a public land-grant research university system in the U.S. state of California. The system is composed of the campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, Riverside, San Diego, San Franci ...

, Los Angeles, contributor to the

GNU operating system GNU () is an extensive collection of free software (383 packages as of January 2022), which can be used as an operating system or can be used in parts with other operating systems. The use of the completed GNU tools led to the family of operat ...

for over thirty years and current maintainer of the Time Zone Database. Free Software Awards winners announced: SecuRepairs, Protesilaos Stavrou, Paul Eggert
FSF

Social benefit award

Source
The Award for Projects of Social Benefit
IMG 5010 - Flickr - Jason

The Free Software Award for Projects of Social Benefit is an annual award granted by the

(FSF). In announcing the award, the FSF explained that: According to

Richard Stallman Richard Matthew Stallman (; born March 16, 1953), also known by his initials, rms, is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in such a manner that its users have the freedom to ...

, former 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 the FSF. The first was the

Award for the Advancement of Free Software Free Software Foundation (FSF) grants two annual awards. Since 1998, FSF has granted the award for Advancement of Free Software and since 2005, also the Free Software Award for Projects of Social Benefit. Presentation ceremonies In 1999 it was pr ...

(AAFS).

Winners

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

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...

: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 ''Groklaw'' is a website that covered legal news of interest to the free and open source software community. Started as a law blog on May 16, 2003 by paralegal Pamela Jones (''"PJ"''), it covered issues such as the SCO-Linux lawsuits, the EU ...

:"An invaluable source of legal and technical information for software developers, lawyers, law professors, and historians" ;2008 Creative Commons :" orfoster nga growing body of creative, educational and scientific works that can be shared and built upon by others ndwork ngto raise awareness of the harm inflicted by increasingly restrictive copyright regimes." ;2009

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...

: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 GNU Health is a free/libre health and hospital information system with strong focus on public health and social medicine. Its functionality includes management of electronic health records and laboratory information management system. It is de ...

:For their work with health professionals around the world to improve the lives of the underprivileged. ;2012

OpenMRS OpenMRS is a collaborative open-source project to develop software to support the delivery of health care in developing countries. OpenMRS is founded on the principles of openness and sharing of ideas, software and strategies for deployment and ...

:"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 Linux computers to underprivileged children in Austin, TX. ;2015

Library Freedom Project The Library Freedom Project teaches librarians about surveillance threats, privacy rights, and digital tools to thwart surveillance. In 2015 the Project began an endeavour to place relays and, particularly, exit nodes of the Tor anonymity network ...

: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. ;2016

SecureDrop SecureDrop is a free software platform for secure communication between journalists and sources (whistleblowers). It was originally designed and developed by Aaron Swartz and Kevin Poulsen under the name ''DeadDrop''. James Dolan also co-create ...

:an open-source software platform for secure communication between journalists and sources (

whistleblowers A whistleblower (also written as whistle-blower or whistle blower) is a person, often an employee, who reveals information about activity within a private or public organization that is deemed illegal, immoral, illicit, unsafe or fraudulent. Whi ...

) ;2017 Public Lab :a non-profit organization that facilitates collaborative, open source environmental research in a model known as Community Science ;2018 OpenStreetMap :a collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world. Founded by Steve Coast in the UK in 2004, OpenStreetMap is built by a community of over one million community members and has found its application on thousands of Web sites, mobile apps, and hardware devices. OpenStreetMap is the only truly global service without restrictions on use or availability of map information. ;2019

Let's Encrypt Let's Encrypt is a non-profit certificate authority run by Internet Security Research Group (ISRG) that provides X.509 certificates for Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption at no charge. It is the world's largest certificate authority, used ...

:a Certificate Authority (CA) that provides an easy way to obtain and install free TLS/SSL certificates. ;2020 CiviCRM :free program that nonprofit organizations around the world use to manage their mailings and contact databases ;2021 SecuRepairs :an association of information security experts who support the right to repair

Award for outstanding new Free Software contributor

The third annual award created by the FSF, the award is presented to an exceptional newcomer to the free software community.

Winners

The award was first awarded for 2019 at

LibrePlanet LibrePlanet (literally, "Free Planet") is a community project created and supported by the Free Software Foundation. Its objective is the promotion of free software around the world by bringing every year an international conference to local comm ...

2020, and the recipients have been: ;2019 Clarissa Lima Borges :Outreachy internship work focused on usability testing for various GNOME applications. ;2020 Alyssa Rosenzweig :Leads the Panfrost project, a project to reverse engineer and implement a free driver for the Mali series of graphics processing units (GPUs) used on a wide variety of single-board computers and mobile phones. ;2021 Protesilaos Stavrou :A philosopher who since 2019 has become a mainstay of the

GNU Emacs GNU Emacs is a free software text editor. It was created by GNU Project founder Richard Stallman, based on the Emacs editor developed for Unix operating systems. GNU Emacs has been a central component of the GNU project and a flagship project of ...

community through his blog posts, conference talks, livestreams, and code contributions.

Award Committee

* 1998: Peter H. Salus, Scott Christley, Rich Morin, Adam Richter,

, and

Vernor Vinge Vernor Steffen Vinge (; born October 2, 1944) is an American science fiction author and retired professor. He taught mathematics and computer science at San Diego State University. He is the first wide-scale popularizer of the technological singu ...

* 1999: Peter H. Salus, ''no further details found'' * 2000: ''no details found'' * 2001 ''The selection committee included:''

Ian Murdock Ian Ashley Murdock (April28, 1973 – December 28, 2015) was an American software engineer, known for being the founder of the Debian project and Progeny Linux Systems, a commercial Linux company. Life and career Although Murdock's parents we ...

, Eric S. Raymond, Peter H. Salus,

, and

* 2002 ''The selection committee included:'' Enrique A. Chaparro, Frederic Couchet, Hong Feng,

, Raj Mathur,

Frederick Noronha Frederick Noronha (born 23 December 1963) in São Paulo, Brazil is a journalist based in Saligão in the Bardez taluka of Goa. He is active in cyberspace and involved with e-ventures involving Goa, developmental concerns and free software. No ...

, Jonas Öberg, Eric S. Raymond,

, Peter H. Salus, Suresh Ramasubramanian, and

* 2003 ''The selection committee included:'' Enrique A. Chaparro, Frederic Couchet,

, Raj Mathur,

, Jonas Öberg,

Bruce Perens Bruce Perens (born around 1958) is an American computer programmer and advocate in the free software movement. He created The Open Source Definition and published the first formal announcement and manifesto of open source. He co-founded the Open ...

, Peter H. Salus, Suresh Ramasubramanian,

, and

* 2004: Suresh Ramasubramanian, Raj Mathur,

, Hong Feng, Frederic Couchet, Enrique A. Chaparro,

, Alan Cox, Peter H Salus,

* 2005: Peter H. Salus (chair),

, Alan Cox,

, Frederic Couchet, Jonas Öberg, Hong Feng,

, Raj Mathur, Suresh Ramasubramanian, Enrique A. Chaparro,

* 2006: Peter H. Salus (chair),

, Alan Cox,

, Frederic Couchet, Jonas Öberg, Hong Feng, Raj Mathur, Suresh Ramasubramanian * 2008: Suresh Ramasubramanian (Chair), Peter H. Salus, Raj Mathur, Hong Feng,

, Jonas Öberg,

, and Fernanda G. Weiden. * 2009: Suresh Ramasubramanian (Chair), Peter H. Salus,

, Raj Mathur,

, Hong Feng,

, Jonas Öberg,

, Fernanda G. Weiden and

. * 2010: Suresh Ramasubramanian (Chair), Peter H. Salus, Raj Mathur,

, Hong Feng,

, Jonas Öberg,

, Fernanda G. Weiden and

. * 2011: Suresh Ramasubramanian (Chair), Peter H. Salus, Raj Mathur,

, Hong Feng,