| FSF Opens Nominations For Free Software Awards |
| Written by Kay Ewbank | |||
| Tuesday, 18 February 2025 | |||
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The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has announced that nominations are open for this year's Free Software Awards. These prestigious awards demonstrate appreciation of the efforts of members of the free software community and anybody can make a nomination. The FSF is a non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman in 1985. It advocates free software, preferably distributed under copyleft terms, such as with its own GNU General Public License.
Each year since 1998 FSF has awarded prizes for Free Software in three categories, for advancing free software, outstanding new contributor, and project of social benefit. Previous winners include Karen Sandler in 2017, the Executive Director of the Software Freedom Conservancy; Matthew Garrett in 2014, for his work to keep “Secure Boot” compatible with open source; and Deborah Nicholson in 2018, for her advocacy for political information, freedom of speech and assembly, and civil liberties.
From left: Deborah Nicholson, Richard Stallman, and Kate Chapman at the 2018 Free Software Awards event
The FSF Award for the Advancement of Free Software is made to an individual who during the previous year has done something that's helped advance free software in a way that's appropriate to "the spirit of the community." Previous recipients, as reported by I-Programmer, included Yukihiro Matsumoto, creator of the Ruby programming in 2012 and Dr Fernando Perez, creator of IPython, the following year. The FSF Award for Projects of Social Benefit is awarded to an organization or team that brings free software principles to a project that "intentionally and significantly benefits society in other aspects of life, and the FSF Award for Outstanding New Free Software Contributor is presented to a newcomer to free software or open source who's exhibited a dedication to software freedom. The FSF says that the award recipient must have made their first significant free software-related contributions in 2024 and show a pattern of ongoing activity. Nomination are being accepted until the end of March 5 2025. Anyone can nominate candidates, according to Greg Farough, the FSF’s Campaigns Manager: “You do not have to be an FSF associate member to nominate. You do not even have to have an account on our website; we want everyone in the free software community to participate, so we open this as wide as possible." Award winners are decided by a committee made of past award winners and the majority vote wins.Usually the winners of the FSF Awards are announced at the LibrePlanet conference, but this year that event is being replaced by the Free Software Foundation's 40th Anniversary Celebrations.
More InformationThe FSF Award for the Advancement of Free Software The FSF Award for Projects of Social Benefit The Award for Outstanding New Free Software Contributor Related ArticlesRuby Creator Wins Free Software Award IPython Creator Wins Free Software Award To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin. 
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