The FSF announces the winners of the annual prize for contribution to free software

fsf-award-jami

Sébastien Blin (left) and Cyrille Béraud (right) receiving the Social Benefit Projects Award on behalf of GNU Jami.

a few days ago the LibrePlanet 2023 conference was held, in which se organized a delivery ceremony of prizes to announce the winners of the «Free Software Awards 2022» annual.

These awards are established by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and awarded to individuals who have made the most significant contribution to free software development, as well as socially significant free projects.

The winners received commemorative minutes and certificates (the FSF award does not imply a monetary reward). He Free Software Promotion and Development Award went to Eli Zaretskii, one GNU Emacs maintainers, who has been involved in the development of the project for more than 30 years. Eli Zaretsky has also been involved in the development of GNU Texinfo, GDB, GNU Make, and GNU Grep.

In his recorded acceptance of the award, Zaretskii said:

«The truth is that my contribution to free software in general and to the development of Emacs in particular is quite modest, certainly in comparison with those who won this award before me. [..] And even my modest achievement as an Emacs developer and ultimately co-maintainer would have been impossible without all the other contributors and the Emacs community as a whole. No significant free software project can be developed, maintained, and carried forward without the participation and support of its members. And Emacs is no exception.

In his recorded message in honor of Zaretskii, Richard Stallman, original author of GNU Emacs and GNUisance Head of the GNU Project said:

“The first GNU package that we released, the first that people really started using, was GNU Emacs in early 1985. For many years, I was the main maintainer of GNU Emacs, but then others came along to do the job, and I haven't been. heavily involved in Emacs development for many, many years. Today our main Emacs maintainer is extremely diligent and conscientious and has sparked a renaissance in new features and new packages added to Emacs, and the result is very impressive. So I'm happy to give the Free Software Award to Eli Zaretskii, main maintainer of GNU Emacs. Thank you for your work."

At Lóleo Eventos, category granted to projects that have brought significant benefits to society and contributed to the solution of important social problems, the award was given to the GNU Jami project (formerly known as Ring and SFLphone), which develops a decentralized communication platform for both large group communications and individual calls with a high level of privacy and security. The platform supports direct connection between users (P2P) using end-to-end encryption.

At Lóleo Eventos, category Featured New Contributor Contribution for free software, which honors newcomers whose early contributions show a visible commitment to the free software movement, the award went to Tad (SkewedZeppelin), the lead of the DivestOS project, which maintains a fork of LineageOS, the Android mobile platform that removes all non-free components. Previously, Tad was also involved in Android Replicant firmware development.

Receiving the award, Tad said:

"In the virtual community that has formed around it, along with the surrounding areas, I have endeavored to help users realize the importance of free software, and as such, I thank the FSF for acknowledging that I have established made a dent, and I plan to continue to do so for years to come. As a final note, I want to remind everyone to ultimately have fun and don't forget to enjoy our short lives on this ball. hurtling through space. Thank you".

Last but not least, we would also like to remember the last winners of the Free Software awards

  • In 2021 Paul Eggert, responsible for maintaining the time zone database used by most Unix systems and all Linux distributions.
  • In 2020 Bradley M. Kuhn, CEO and founding member of the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC).
  • In 2019 Jim Meyering, maintainer of the GNU Coreutils package since 1991, co-author of autotools, and creator of Gnulib.
  • In 2018 Deborah Nicholson, director of community engagement, Software Freedom Conservancy.
  • In 2017 Karen Sandler, Director, Software Freedom Conservancy.
  • In 2016 Alexandre Oliva, Brazilian free software promoter and developer, founder of the Latin American Open Source Foundation, author of the Linux-Libre project (a completely free version of the Linux kernel).
  • In 2015 Werner Koch, creator and lead developer of the GnuPG (GNU Privacy Guard) toolkit;

Finally, if you are interested in being able to learn more about it, you can consult the original publication In the following link.


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