The 2023 FSF Free Software Awards

Posted May 7, 2024 12:41 UTC (Tue) by coriordan (guest, #7544)
In reply to: The 2023 FSF Free Software Awards by farnz
Parent article: The 2023 FSF Free Software Awards

I think the "outstanding new free software contributor" award is a difficult category to judge. It's almost inevitable that the winner will be someone we've never heard of. And with their first contributions it's unlikely they'll have created something that amazes everyone.

But there are exceptions. In 2021 the award went to Alyssa Rosenzweig, who reverse engineered the Mali GPU's of some common Arm boards and wrote free drivers. And then it seems she went on to reverse engineer a bunch of other Apple GPUs to produce more free drivers. That's amazing for anyone, particularly a new contributor. https://www.fsf.org/news/free-software-awards-winners-ann...

I'm also quite happy to happy to hear about Parabolic. I was always concerned about what happens if yt-dlp stops being maintained or stops working for whatever reason.

The 2023 FSF Free Software Awards

Posted May 7, 2024 14:47 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

If your peer comment by numgmt is accurate, then if yt-dlp stops working, so does Parabolic (it's a nice frontend for yt-dlp, not an independent implementation of the needed protocols).

And yes, the judging process is hard for all three of the awards; but if you step backwards and write the press release, only one of the three awards is one that I could explain to someone who is curious about what Free Software and the FSF are all about (the code.gouv.fr one). The other two are only relevant if you're already convinced that the FSF's philosophical positions are right; that's a bad position for the organisation as a whole to be in, since it means that these awards aren't great for bringing in new people to the movement.