[GNU/FSF Press] Free Software Award Winners Announced: John Gilmore and the Internet Archive

[Peter Brown]

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 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 collects freely available information and 
makes it public domain or freely licensed books, in collaboration with 
libraries all over the world. They have collected hundreds of thousands 
of live concert recordings, all freely available, all with permission of 
the artists, almost all in lossless formats. These recordings were made 
by thousands of volunteers, and curated  volunteers. They have been 
archiving the Web at large since 1996, making their copies available to 
the public. They also collaborate with more than a hundred public 
archives and libraries to make digital archives of entire countries, 
agencies, and topic areas, in their Archive-It service (archive-it.org). 
Their movies/videos are all freely down-loadable in a variety of formats 
-- including the free software format Ogg Theora. They have written free 
software of their own such as Heritrix, their web crawler -- 
crawler.archive.org, and the Wayback Machine.

Previous winners of the social benefit award:

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

This year's award committee was chaired by Suresh Ramasubramanian and 
included Peter H. Salus, 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.
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