'Free Software Awards' Winners Announced: Andy Wingo, Alx Sa, Govdirectory

This week the Free Software Foundation honored Andy Wingo, Alx Sa, and Govdirectory with this year's annual Free Software Awards (given to community members and groups making "significant" contributions to software freedom): Andy Wingo is one of the co-maintainers of GNU Guile, the official extension language of the GNU operating system and the Scheme "backbone" of GNU Guix. Upon receiving the award, he stated: "Since I learned about free software, the vision of a world in which hackers freely share and build on each others' work has been a profound inspiration to me, and I am humbled by this recognition of my small efforts in the context of the Guile Scheme implementation. I thank my co-maintainer, Ludovic Courtès, for his comradery over the years: we are just building on the work of the past maintainers of Guile, and I hope that we live long enough to congratulate its many future maintainers."

The 2024 Award for Outstanding New Free Software Contributor went to Alx Sa for work on the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP). When asked to comment, Alx responded: "I am honored to receive this recognition! I started contributing to the GNU Image Manipulation Program as a way to return the favor because of all the cool things it's allowed me to do. Thanks to the help and mentorship of amazing people like Jehan Pagès, Jacob Boerema, Liam Quin, and so many others, I hope I've been able to help other people do some cool new things, too."

Govdirectory was presented with this year's Award for Projects of Social Benefit, given to a project or team responsible for applying free software, or the ideas of the free software movement, to intentionally and significantly benefit society. Govdirectory provides a collaborative and fact-checked listing of government addresses, phone numbers, websites, and social media accounts, all of which can be viewed with free software and under a free license, allowing people to always reach their representatives in freedom...

The FSF plans to further highlight the Free Software Award winners in a series of events scheduled for the new year to celebrate their contributions to free software.

Imagine

[phantomfive]

"Since I learned about free software, the vision of a world in which hackers freely share and build on each others' work has been a profound inspiration to me,

Imagine a world without enshittification. It only happens because we let it.

dust

[markdavis]

>"official extension language of the GNU operating system"

"GNU operating system?" Has Herd been dragged out of the dust bin or something?

Re:

[Bu11etmagnet]

> "GNU operating system?" Has Herd been dragged out of the dust bin or something?

There's this thing called GNU/Linux ( https://www.gnu.org/ [gnu.org] ). I've heard good things about it.

Re:

[markdavis]

Right. That is Linux. It is not "GNU OS". GNU doesn't have a production-ready kernel (or a kernel actually used by anything of any significance), and that is the core of an OS. Without Linux, it is not an OS. So the author and page designer is/are calling a Linux distribution or "GNU/Linux" by "GNU OS", which is very misleading.

Re:

[tlhIngan]

Also note that Linux is GPLv2-only. GNU would want something compliant with GPLv3. Linus Torvalds has made his opinion on the GPLv3 very clear (he thinks it's a huge mistake to make it part of the GPL especially given the incompatibility).

And before you say TiVo-ization (funny,a term that basically now outlast the original company), Linus acknowledges that, but also acknowledges the fact that Linux got some much-needed MIPS patches from TiVo to fix various bugs.