FSF Free Software Awards


The Free Software Foundation grants two annual awards. Since 1998, FSF has granted the award for Advancement of Free Software and since 2005, also the Free Software Award for Projects of Social Benefit.

Presentation ceremonies

In 1999 the award for Advancement of Free Software was presented at the Jacob Javits Center European Meeting. Since 2006, the awards have been presented at the FSF's annual members meeting in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Advancement of Free Software award

The Advancement of Free Software award is annually presented by the Free Software Foundation to a person whom it deems to have made a great contribution to the progress and development of free software, through activities that accord with the spirit of free software.

Winners

Source:

Larry Wall, 1998

Miguel de Icaza, 1999

Brian Paul, 2000

Guido van Rossum, 2001

Lawrence Lessig, 2002

Alan Cox, 2003

Theo de Raadt, 2004

Andrew Tridgell, 2005

Theodore Ts'o, 2006

Harald Welte, 2007

Wietse Venema, 2008

John Gilmore, 2009

Rob Savoye, 2010

Yukihiro Matsumoto, 2011

Fernando Pérez, 2012

Matthew Garrett, 2013

Sébastien Jodogne, 2014

Werner Koch, 2015

Alexandre Oliva, 2016

Karen Sandler, 2017

Deborah Nicholson, 2018

Jim Meyering, 2019

Bradley M. Kuhn, 2020

Paul Eggert, 2021

;1998 Larry Wall
;1999 Miguel de Icaza
;2000 Brian Paul
;2001 Guido van Rossum
;2002 Lawrence Lessig
;2003 Alan Cox
;2004 Theo de Raadt
;2005 Andrew Tridgell
;2006 Theodore Ts'o
;2007 Harald Welte
;2008 Wietse Venema
;2009 John Gilmore
;2010 Rob Savoye
;2011 Yukihiro Matsumoto
;2012 Fernando Pérez
;2013 Matthew Garrett
;2014 Sébastien Jodogne
;2015 Werner Koch
;2016 Alexandre Oliva
;2017 Karen Sandler
;2018 Deborah Nicholson
;2019 Jim Meyering
;2020 Bradley M. Kuhn
;2021 Paul Eggert
;2022 Eli Zaretskii
;2023 Bruno Haible
;2024 Andy Wingo

Social benefit award

Source:
The Free Software Award for Projects of Social Benefit is an annual award granted by the Free Software Foundation. In announcing the award, the FSF explained that:
According to Richard Stallman, former President of FSF, the award was inspired by the Sahana project which was developed, and was used, for organising the transfer of aid to tsunami victims in Sri Lanka after the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake. The developers indicated that they hope to adapt it to aid in other future disasters.
This is the second annual award created by the FSF. The first was the Award for the Advancement of Free Software.

Winners

The award was first awarded in 2005, and the recipients have been:
;2005 Wikipedia
;2006 The Sahana FOSS Disaster Management System
;2007 Groklaw
;2008 Creative Commons
;2009 Internet Archive
;2010 Tor
;2011 GNU Health
;2012 OpenMRS
;2013 GNOME Foundation's Outreach Program for Women
;2014 Reglue
;2015 Library Freedom Project
;2016 SecureDrop
;2017 Public Lab
;2018 OpenStreetMap
;2019 Let's Encrypt
;2020 CiviCRM
;2021 SecuRepairs
;2022 GNU Jami
;2023 code.gouv.fr
;2024 Govdirectory

Award for outstanding new Free Software contributor

The third annual award created by the FSF, the award is presented to an exceptional newcomer to the free software community.

Winners

The award was first awarded for 2019 at LibrePlanet 2020, and the recipients have been:
;2019 Clarissa Lima Borges
;2020 Alyssa Rosenzweig
;2021 Protesilaos Stavrou
; 2022 Tad
; 2023 Nick Logozzo
; 2024 Alx Sa

Award Committee