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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.
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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.
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.
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]
Source: Award for the Advancement of Free Software
 Larry Wall, 1998 |  Miguel de Icaza, 1999 |
 Brian Paul, 2000 |  Guido van Rossum, 2001 |
 Lawrence Lessig, 2002 |  Alan Cox, 2003 |
 Theo de Raadt, 2004 |  Andrew Tridgell, 2005 |
 Theodore Ts'o, 2006 |  Harald Welte, 2007 |
 Wietse Venema, 2008 |  John Gilmore, 2009 |
 Rob Savoye, 2010 |  Yukihiro Matsumoto, 2011 |
 Fernando Pérez, 2012 |  Matthew Garrett, 2013 |
 Sébastien Jodogne, 2014 |  Werner Koch, 2015 |
 Alexandre Oliva, 2016 |  Karen Sandler, 2017 |
 Deborah Nicholson, 2018 |  Jim Meyering, 2019 |
 Bradley M. Kuhn, 2020 |  Paul Eggert, 2021 |
Source: The Award for Projects of Social Benefit
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]
This is the second annual award created by the FSF. The first was the Award for the Advancement of Free Software (AAFS).
The award was first awarded in 2005, and the recipients have been: [32]
The third annual award created by the FSF, the award is presented to an exceptional newcomer to the free software community. [36]
The award was first awarded for 2019 at LibrePlanet 2020, and the recipients have been:
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Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting 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, not price; all users are legally free to do what they want with their copies of a free software regardless of how much is paid to obtain the program. Computer programs are deemed "free" if they give end-users ultimate control over the software and, subsequently, over their devices.
The free software movement is a social movement with the goal of obtaining and guaranteeing certain freedoms for software users, namely the freedoms to run, study, modify, and share copies of software. Software which meets these requirements, The Four Essential Freedoms of Free Software, is termed free software.
GNU is an extensive collection of free software, 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 operating systems popularly known as Linux. Most of GNU is licensed under the GNU Project's own General Public License (GPL).
The GNU Project is a free software, mass collaboration project announced by Richard Stallman on September 27, 1983. Its goal is to give computer users freedom and control in their use of their computers and computing devices by collaboratively developing and publishing software that gives everyone the rights to freely run the software, copy and distribute it, study it, and modify it. GNU software grants these rights in its license.
Groklaw was 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 antitrust case against Microsoft, and the standardization of Office Open XML.
The GNU/Linux naming controversy is a controversy regarding whether computer operating systems that use GNU software and the Linux kernel should be referred to as "GNU/Linux" or "Linux" systems.
Wietse Zweitze Venema is a Dutch programmer and physicist best known for writing the Postfix email system. He also wrote TCP Wrapper and collaborated with Dan Farmer to produce the computer security tools SATAN and The Coroner's Toolkit.
Bradley M. Kuhn is a free software activist from the United States.
Alternative terms for free software, such as open source, FOSS, and FLOSS, have been a controversial issue among free and open-source software users from the late 1990s onwards. These terms share almost identical licence criteria and development practices.
Harald Welte, also known as LaForge, is a German programmer.
gpl-violations.org is a not-for-profit project founded and led by Harald Welte in 2004. It works to make sure software licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) is not used in ways prohibited by the license.
Richard Matthew Stallman, 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 use, study, distribute, and modify that software. Software which ensures these freedoms is termed free software. Stallman launched the GNU Project, founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF) in October 1985, developed the GNU Compiler Collection and GNU Emacs, and wrote all versions of the GNU General Public License.
Tivoization is the practice of designing hardware that incorporates software under the terms of a copyleft software license like the GNU General Public License, but uses hardware restrictions or digital rights management (DRM) to prevent users from running modified versions of the software on that hardware. Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) coined the term in reference to TiVo's use of GNU GPL licensed software on the TiVo brand digital video recorders (DVR), which actively block modified software by design. Stallman believes this practice denies users some of the freedom that the GNU GPL was designed to protect. The FSF refers to tivoized hardware as "proprietary tyrants".
gNewSense was a Linux distribution, active from 2006 to 2016. It was based on Debian, and developed with sponsorship from the Free Software Foundation. Its goal was user-friendliness, but with all proprietary and non-free software removed. The Free Software Foundation considered gNewSense to be composed entirely of free software.
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The GNU General Public Licenses are a series of widely used free software licenses, or copyleft licenses, that guarantee end users the freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The GPL was the first copyleft license for general use. It was originally written by Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), for the GNU Project. The license grants the recipients of a computer program the rights of the Free Software Definition. The licenses in the GPL series are all copyleft licenses, which means that any derivative work must be distributed under the same or equivalent license terms. It is more restrictive than the Lesser General Public License and even further distinct from the more widely-used permissive software licenses such as BSD, MIT, and Apache.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman on October 4, 1985. The organisation supports the free software movement, with the organization's preference for software being distributed under copyleft terms, such as with its own GNU General Public License. The FSF was incorporated in Boston, Massachusetts, United States, where it is also based.
Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman is a collection of writings by Richard Stallman. It introduces the subject of history and development of the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation, explains the author's philosophical position on the Free Software movement, deals with the topics of software ethics, copyright and patent laws, as well as business practices in application to computer software. The author proposes Free software licenses as a solution to social issues created by proprietary software and described in essays.
Jonas Öberg is a free and open-source software activist, describing himself as an instigator in the world of free, having worked with the Free Software Foundation Europe, GNU Project, FSCONS, Creative Commons and the Shuttleworth Foundation. He started to develop software in 1991 and installed his first Linux operating system in 1993 after which he eventually joined as a webmaster for the GNU Project. In the late 1990s, he spent some time at the MIT AI Labs where he met with Richard Stallman and others from the Free Software Foundation, joining them for The Bazaar conference in New York. Since 2002, he has been on the award committee for the Free Software Foundation's Free Software Awards.
LibrePlanet 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 communities and organizations.
