FSF Free Software Awards

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.

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.

Winners

• 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 GNU 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 — 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)

Award Committee

• 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
• 2003 "The selection committee included": Enrique A. Chaparro, Frederic Couchet, Miguel de Icaza, Raju Mathur, Frederick Noronha, Jonas Oberg, Bruce Perens, Peter Salus, Suresh Ramasubramanian, Richard Stallman, and Vernor Vinge
• 2002 "The selection committee included": Enrique A. Chaparro, Frederic Couchet, Hong Feng, Miguel de Icaza, Raju Mathur, Frederick Noronha, Jonas Oberg, Eric Raymond, Guido van Rossum, Peter Salus, Suresh Ramasubramanian, and Larry Wall
• 2001 "The selection committee included": Miguel de Icaza, Ian Murdock, Eric Raymond, Peter Salus, Vernor Vinge, and Larry Wall
• 2000: (no details found)
• 1999: Peter Salus, (no further details found)
• 1998: Peter Salus, Scott Christley, Rich Morin, Adam Richter, Richard Stallman, and Vernor Vinge

External links

• Official site