The 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 the award for Advancement of Free Software was presented at the Jacob Javits Center 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
The Advancement of Free Software award 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.[1]
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.[4]
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.[6]
for his work advocating the importance of software freedom, his outspoken opposition to the US'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.[7]
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.[8]
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.[10]
Additionally, a special mention was made to honor the memory and contribution of Adrian Hands, who used a morse input device to code and successfully submit a GNOME patch, three days before he died from ALS.[14]
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.[20]
for his work in promoting Free Software and the involvement in projects like the maintenance of linux-libre and the reverse engineer of the proprietary software used by Brazilian citizens to submit their taxes to the government.[21]
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. "[23]
2009 Award for Projects of Social Benefit awarded to The Internet Archive.
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.[30]
According to Richard Stallman, 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 in other future disasters.[31]
"[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."[12]
For collecting freely available information, archiving the web, collaborating with libraries, and creating free software to make information available to the public.[13]
"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."[16][17]
OPW's work benefits society, "addressing gender discrimination by empowering women to develop leadership and development skills in a society which runs on technology".[18]
2014 Reglue
which donates refurbished Linux computers to underprivileged children in Austin, TX.[19]
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.[20]
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.[23]
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.
A philosopher who since 2019 has become a mainstay of the GNU Emacs community through his blog posts, conference talks, livestreams, and code contributions.[26]
2022 Tad (SkewedZepplin)
Lead developer of DivestOS, which aims to remove proprietary binaries, and supports free software, security, privacy, and extending usefulness of older devices. Also a contributor to Replicant.[27][28]
