Richard Stallman announced at the LibrePlanet 2019 conference to the winners of the Free Software Awards 2018, established by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and awarded to the people who made the most significant contribution to the development of free software.
The award for social benefit projects is awarded 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.
The award for the promotion and development of free software was won by Deborah Nicholson, director of community engagement at Software Freedom Conservancy who works in areas where technology intersects with issues of social justice, defense of unlimited access to information, freedom of expression and assembly, as well as civil liberties.
Deborah Nicholson and OpenStreetMap Award Winners
Deborah joined the ACT movement in 2006 after several years of organizing local speeches for freedom of expression, equality for women and transparency of political processes.
In the beginning, Deborah worked at the ACT Foundation, where he oversaw the organization's membership programs, organized conferences and promoted initiatives to involve women in the development of STRs.
Ella continues her work as founding organizer of the Seattle GNU / Linux Conference, an annual event dedicated to creating new voices and welcoming new people to the free software community.
Stallman praised his body of work and his tireless and widespread contributions to the free software community.
"Deborah continually reaches out to new audiences and attracts them with her message about the need for free software in any version of the future."
Deborah continued:
“Free software is vitally important for autonomy, privacy and a healthy democracy, but it cannot achieve it if it is only accessible to some, or if it is alienating to large sectors of the people. That is why it is so important. »
We continue to emerge new voices, opening space for non-programmers and welcoming new contributors to the free software community.
I also find that in addition to helping us create a bigger and better movement, the welcoming work is extremely rewarding.
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 free OpenStreetMap project, aimed at creating a publicly accessible co-editable world map.
On behalf of OpenStreetMap, Kate Chapman received the award, who holds the chairmanship of the OpenStreetMap Foundation and co-founded the HOT project (Humanitarian Open Street Map Team).
Previous winning projects
This award It is awarded annually and has been carried out since 2005. Here we share a list of the previous winners:
Alexandre Oliva 2016, Brazilian popularizer and free software developer, founder of the Latin American Open Source Foundation, author of the Linux Libre project (completely free version of the Linux kernel).
2015 Werner Koch, creator and lead developer of GnuPG toolkit (GNU Privacy Guard).
2014 Sebastien Jodogne, author of Orthanc, A Free DICOM Server for Accessing Computed Tomography Data.
2013 Matthew Garrett, one of the Linux kernel developers, part of the Linux Foundation technical advisory, who has made a significant contribution to ensuring booting Linux on systems with UEFI Secure Boot.
2012 Fernando Pérez 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 the past 20 years.
2010 Rob Savoye project leader Gnash Free Flash Player, GCC, GDB, DejaGnu, Newlib, Libgloss, Cygwin, eCos, Expect, founder, Open Media Now.
2009 John Gilmore, one of the founders of the human rights organization Electronic Frontier Foundation, creator of the legendary Cypherpunks mailing list and Usenet alt conference 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.