[2s.mk-friends] Fwd: [FSF] Free Software Award Winners Announced: John Gilmore and the Internet Archive

Thu Mar 25 19:27:23 UTC 2010

You can see photographs of the award winners at:
http://www.fsf.org/news/2009-free-software-awards

BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA -- March 23, 2010 -- The Free Software
Foundation (FSF) announced the winners of the annual free software
awards at a ceremony on Saturday March 20, held during the LibrePlanet
conference at Harvard Science Center in Cambridge, MA.

The award for the Advancement of Free Software was won by John
Gilmore. The award for Project of Social Benefit was won by the
Internet Archive. The awards were presented by FSF president and
founder Richard M. Stallman.

Brewster Kahle co-founder and chairman of the Internet Archive was at
the ceremony to collect the award and spoke about the work of his
organization, "We are trying to follow in the footsteps of the free
software movement and apply these ideas to the cultural materials
layer, building organizations that are founded on these principals."

John Gilmore who had earlier given a presentation at the conference on
the future goals of the free software movement, said on receiving the
award, "Free software has been very good to me, and I'm glad that I
have been good to it." The awards committee recognized Gilmore's many
contributions and long term commitment to the free software movement.

The award citation for John Gilmore read:

   As one of the founders of Cygnus Solutions, Gilmore gave free
software a place in the business world long before GNU/Linux became
popular. He is a well-known free software and freedom activist. He is
a co-founder of the EFF, the alt newsgroup, and a major promoter of
cryptography. He has written or contributed to free software including
the projects pdtar (which became GNU Tar), GNU UUCP, GNU GDB and
Kerberos. John has also promoted free software through his
philanthropy, funding many free software projects including, GNU Radio
and GNU Gnash and he remains active in advancing the cause of computer
user freedom.

John Gilmore joins a distinguished list of previous winners:

   * 2008 Wietse Venema
   * 2007 Harald Welte
   * 2006 Ted Ts'o
   * 2005 Andrew Tridgell
   * 2004 Theo de Raadt
   * 2003 Alan Cox
   * 2002 Lawrence Lessig
   * 2001 Guido van Rossum
   * 2000 Brian Paul
   * 1999 Miguel de Icaza
   * 1998 Larry Wall

The Award for Projects of Social Benefit is presented annually to a
team or organization that applies free software, or the ideas of the
free software movement, in a way that significantly benefits society.
The award citation for the Internet Archive read:

   The Internet Archive is a non-profit founded to build a free and
open Internet library. They provide 1.8 million free public domain and
out of print books in collaboration with libraries all over the world.
They have collected more than 500,000 audio items, including over
70,000 live concert recordings made freely available in lossless
formats by thousands of volunteers with the permission of the artists.
More than 200,000 video items are freely downloadable in a variety of
formats, including the free software video format Ogg Theora. They
have been archiving the Web at large since 1996, making over 150
billion copies of web pages available to the public through the
Wayback Machine. The Internet Archive has written free software of
their own, including Heretrix, their web crawler
(crawler.archive.org), and a free software version of the Wayback
Machine software, in addition to contributing patches to many other
free software projects <http://www.archive.org>.

Previos winners of the social benefit award:

   * 2008 Creative Commons
   * 2007 Groklaw
   * 2006 Sahana Disaster Management System
   * 2005 Wikipedia

This year's award committee was chaired by Suresh Ramasubramanian and
included Peter H. Salus, Wietse Venema, Lawrence Lessig, Raj Mathur,
Hong Feng, Andrew Tridgell, Jonas Oberg, Verner Vinge, Richard
Stallman, Fernanda G. Weiden and Harald Welte.

About the Free Software Foundation

The Free Software Foundation, founded in 1985, is dedicated to
promoting computer users' right to use, study, copy, modify, and
redistribute computer programs. The FSF promotes the development and
use of free (as in freedom) software -- particularly the GNU operating
system and its GNU/Linux variants -- and free documentation for free
software. The FSF also helps to spread awareness of the ethical and
political issues of freedom in the use of software, and its Web sites,
located at fsf.org and gnu.org, are an important source of information
about GNU/Linux. Donations to support the FSF's work can be made at
http://donate.fsf.org. Its headquarters are in Boston, MA, USA.

Media Contacts

Peter Brown
Free Software Foundation
+1 (617) 542 5942
campaigns at fsf.org

info-fsf mailing list
info-fsf at gnu.org
Unsubscribe: http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-fsf

-- 
http://blog.gemidjy.me || http://wiki.lugola.net
Member of Lugola, 2s.mk, FSF (no.6023),
GnuPG: 754AC43D,

I'm an FSF member -- Help us support software freedom!
http://www.fsf.org/jf?referrer=6023