![[image of the Head of a GNU]](/graphics/gnu-head-sm.jpg)
The First Annual Free Software Foundation Award
for the Advancement of Free Software
MIT Media Lab
Friday, October 9, 1998
Finalists
The Apache Project is a collaborative software development effort
aimed at creating a robust, commercial-grade, featureful, and
freely-available source code implementation of an HTTP (Web) server.
"Apache has demonstrated that free software can be the best
available in open (market) competition, measured by commercial
standards of quality, and that an open, distributed development
process can produce such software. While there are many other pieces
of commercial-quality free software available, I believe Apache is
unique in both being clearly preferred to its commercial competitors
*and* having been developed in a relatively decentralized manner."
Donald J. Becker was nominated for network device drivers for
GNU/Linux, and for the Beowulf project.
He is a Staff Scientist with the Center of Excellence in Space Data
and Information Sciences. CESDIS is part of the University Space
Research Association, a non-profit consortium of universities that
funds space-related university research and runs research groups such
as RIACS and ICASE.
He is also the principal investigator on the Beowulf Project, an
effort to develop a software distribution to help others build
high-performance workstations based on a cluster of off-the-shelf
processing nodes running GNU/Linux.
Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, an internet-based
hypermedia initiative for global information sharing. He directs the
World Wide Web (W3) Consortium, an open forum of companies and
organizations with the mission to realize the full potential of the
Web.
"In the course of history, Hypertext and the concept of a universal
document and linking system has been invented dozens of times. Tim's
unique contribution was enabled by, and indisputably demonstrated, the
inexorable power of free software. Upon this infrastructure, the
World Wide Web came into being, and more than anything else, changed
the world's perception of the intrinsic value of free software."
L. Peter Deutsch was nominated for Ghostscript, an interpreter for the
PostScript (TM) language. A PostScript interpreter usually takes as
input a set of graphics commands. The output is usually a page bitmap
which is then sent to an output device such as a printer or
display. PostScript is embedded in many printers.
"Ghostscript is the base of virtually all GNU/Linux (and possibly
other free OS) printing systems."
Jordan Hubbard was one of the founders of the FreeBSD Project and is
its public relations officer and release engineer, as well as
President and CEO of FreeBSD, Inc. "Number One cat herder." FreeBSD
is an advanced BSD UNIX operating system for "PC-compatible"
computers.
Jordan Hubbard will chair the FREENIX track at USENIX '99 in
Monterey, CA on June 6-11, 1999.
Donald Knuth, one of the acknowledged fathers of computer science, was
nominated for his TeX typesetting system and his technique of
`literate programming.' "His special contribution is that he
>>explained<< a large program that does "real life" work." His books
include _The Art of Computer Programming_, _Literate Programming_, and
_Digital Typography_. He is Professor Emeritus of The Art of Computer
Programming at Stanford University.
In 1974 Donald Knuth won the Turing Award, the ACM's most
prestigious technical award. In 1996 he received the Kyoto Prize,
Japan's highest private award for lifetime achievement, the closest
thing to a Nobel Prize in computer science.
Ted Lemon was nominated for his work with the Internet Software
Consortium. The ISC is a nonprofit corporation for the implementation
of publicly-available code for key portions of the Internet
infrastructure. Its current programs include widely-used
implementations of the Domain Name System (BIND), Netnews (INN) and
the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP). Ted Lemon is
Architect and programmer on ISC DHCP, which automates most of the
management of IP addresses on client machines, and he participates
actively in the support list for that product.
"Ted is excellent at considering the suggestions for changes in the
software and incorporating those which will make the product more
useful, while keeping the code base "rock solid" and making sure that
everything complies with the pertinent RFCs. If more people worked
through an idea before releasing the product the way Ted does,
computer software would be much more reliable and would interact with
other software and hardware more easily."
Brian Paul is the author of the Mesa 3D graphics library. Mesa uses
the OpenGL API (Application Programming Interface). Most applications
written for OpenGL can use Mesa instead without changing the source
code. Mesa was originally designed for Unix/X11 systems and is still
best supported on those systems. Others have contributed drivers for
the Amiga, Apple Macintosh, BeOS, NeXT, OS/2, MS-DOS, VMS, and Windows
95/NT.
Brian Paul now works at Avid Technology in Tewksbury, Mass., but his
work there is not associated with Mesa. He was formerly employed at
the Space Science and Engineering Center at the University of
Wisconsin - Madison.
Eric S. Raymond was nominated for his writings, especially his essay
"The Cathedral and the Bazaar." This paper was described by Netscape
Communications, Inc., as a major factor in their decision to release
their client software as open source.
He is also editor of _The New Hackers' Dictionary_; principal
researcher and author of _Portable C and UNIX Systems Programming_;
programmer of "C-INTERCAL", an INTERCAL-to-C compiler; principal
co-developer of ncurses, a freeware screen-handling library with an
API compatible with System V curses(3); co-curator of the
Retrocomputing Museum; and Technical Director of the Chester County
Internet Link (CCIL).
He "defined what it means to be Open Source" and was
"single-handedly responsible for Netscape going open source." "His
fetchmail program (not to mention that delightful Intercal to C
translator :) ) is a great goodness."
Henry Spencer is a widely quoted UNIX systems programmer who developed
robust and widely used software to handle regular expressions.
He ran the first Usenet site in Canada, and is well-known as a
Usenet contributor in many areas, notably the space and C groups. He
and David Lawrence wrote _Managing Usenet_. He also wrote _The Ten
Commandments For C Programmers_, and the "regular expressions" chapter
for _Software Solutions in C_.
He has written various pieces of freely-available software: the
public-domain getopt, the first redistributable string library, the
widely-used redistributable regular-expression library, the 4.4BSD
POSIX regular-expression library, the awf text formatter, etc. He and
Geoff Collyer wrote C News, one of the two major software packages for
network news transport and storage.
Larry Wall was nominated for his many contributions to the advancement
of freely distributed software, most notably Perl, a robust scripting
language for sophisticated text manipulation and system management.
His other widely-used programs include rn (news reader), patch
(development and distribution tool), metaconfig (a program that writes
Configure scripts), and the Warp space-war game.
"... Perl, a tool that takes the UNIX ideas of flexibility and
portability further than almost any program before it. Perl is
probably the most powerful and widely applicable GNU program."
"Larry Wall has always promoted keeping his implementations free for
all to study, enhance, and build on, without restrictions, and the
freedom for all to benefit in whatever ways they can from his
products."
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Updated: 26 Apr 2000 pwendt