Free Software Award Winners Announced

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.

(photographs are available at 
http://www.fsf.org/news/2009-free-software-awards)

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.