At the LibrePlanet 2020 conference which was held online this year due to this year's coronavirus pandemic, a virtual award ceremony was held to announce the winners of the annual Free Software Awards 2019.
These are established by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and awarded to the people who made the most significant contribution to the development of free software, as well as socially significant free projects. Commemorative records and letters delivered at the ceremony were mailed to the winners.
The award for the promotion and development of free software was awarded to Jim Meyering that actually takes care of maintaining the GNU Coreutils utility, which includes public services such as species, cat, chmod, chown, chroot, cp, date, dd, echo, hostname, id, ln, ls, etc. Jim is also one of the main autotools developers and the creator of Gnulib, who has done a great job of unifying the typical type code of GNU projects.
In the nomination awarded to projects that have brought significant benefits to society and contributed to the solution of important social problems, the award was given to the Let's Encrypt project, which supports a community-controlled non-profit certification center and provides certificates for free.
Let's Encrypt had a significant impact on the transition from the Internet to the widespread use of encrypted traffic on the Web and made HTTPS available to all.
Using encryption, Let's Encrypt managed to solve a problem that seemed insoluble due to commercial interest in the existing infrastructure. According to Josh Aas, head of Let's Encrypt, freedom is not possible without respecting confidentiality. Since many people's lives revolve around the web,
In 2020, there was also a new nomination for the outstanding contribution of a new entrant to free software development, which was awarded to beginners, whose first contribution showed a strong commitment to the free software movement.
The award was received by Clarissa Lima Borges, an engineering student from Brazil, participated in the Outreachy program and manifests themselves in the field of usability testing with a variety of applications for Gnome.
The work focused on making free software more convenient for a wide range of people who need to fully control the applications used and their data.
Of the previous winners, we can find the following:
- 2018Deborah Nicholson, Director of Community Relations at Software Freedom Conservancy.
- 2017Karen Sandler, Director, Software Freedom Conservancy.
- 2016 Alexandre Oliva, Brazilian popularizer and free software developer, founder of the Latin American Open Society Foundation, author of the Linux-Libre project.
- 2015 Werner Koch, creator and lead developer of the GNU Privacy Guard GnuPG Toolkit.
- 2014 Sebastien Jodogne, author of Orthanc, A Free DICOM Server for Accessing Computed Tomography Data.
- 2013 Matthew Garrett, one of the Linux kernel developers, a member of the Linux Foundation technical council, who made a significant contribution to ensuring 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 over 20 years.
- 2010 Rob Savoye, project leader in creating a free Flash player Gnash, development member of GCC, GDB, DejaGnu, Newlib, Libgloss, Cygwin, eCos, Expect, founder of Open Media Now.
- 2009 John Gilmore, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, creator of the legendary Cypherpunks mailing list and the Usenet alt conferencing hierarchy. *. 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 (recognized expert in the field of computer security, creator of such popular projects as Postfix, TCP Wrapper, SATAN and The Coroner's Toolkit).
Source: https://www.fsf.org