Free Software Award Nominees, 1999

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Table of contents

Introduction

This page has been borrowed from Daniel Martin's page. He has kindly agreed to use this information on our website.

The GNU Project gives out this award every year for outstanding contributions to free software. This year's list of nominees is available from the FSF's website.

This page tries to list some of this years nominees and their achievements.

Tom Adelstein
The CIO/CFO of Bynari, Inc. He's the author of several books and articles on business and technology and has management, consulting and hands-on experience in the Information Technology field.
Eric Allman
The original author of sendmail. While working at the University of California, he got involved with the early UNIX effort at Berkeley. Over the years, he wrote a number of utilities that appeared with various releases of BSD, including the -me macros, tset, trek, syslog, vacation, and of course sendmail.
Apache Software Foundation
The people behind several pieces of free software, most notably the Apache web server.
Armed Linux
A GNU/Linux distribution aimed at being installable from inside Windows 9x.
Lennart Augustsson
Created USB tools for NetBSD, the largest and most comprehensive set of USB tools.
Stig Bakken
PHP Core team member
Donald Becker
GNU/Linux kernel hacker; wrote lots of network card drivers; major figure in the Beowulf project at NASA
Brian Behlendorf
Head of the Apache project
Tim Berners-Lee
Created the WWW by authoring the HTML, URL and HTTP standards, as well as the first web server and browsers. Since then a tireless advocate of open content, very active in the w3c.
Jim Blandy
Maintainer of guile, the FSF's preferred extension language and all-around good programming glue. Has worked for the Free Software Foundation on and off for nine years.
Craig Burley
Long time g77 project leader.
Thomas Bushnell
Designer and current maintainer of GNU Hurd. Previously maintained GNU tar.
Shane Caraveo
Core PHP developer. (And I suspect more; any help on this?)
James Clark
His developments include groff, sgmls, SP, Jade, XT and XP. He has been heavily involved with standards bodies (ISO SC34 and W3C), and was the technical lead for the development of XML. His software is noted for its attention to internationalization issues.
Alan Cox
Linux kernel hacker extraordinaire; creater and maintainer of Portaloo, a portal cgi engine.
Miguel de Icaza
One of the driving forces behind gnome; also the main author of Midnight Commander, a very popular non-GUI (i.e. console) file manager. He was also heavily involved in one of the Linux kernel ports, and is heavily involved in developing Gnumeric (the GNOME spreadsheet) and Bonobo (the GNOME embedding architecture).
DJ Delorie
The only reason there exists any GNU software for DOS. Ok, that may be a slight exaggeration, but this is the person behind DJGPP, the gnu compiler port to DOS.
Debian Project
People who put together Debian, a GNU/Linux distribution.
Theo De Raadt
Created OpenBSD, making the most proactively secure OS around.
Matthias Ettrich
Lead developer of Lyx, then KDE on top of Qt.
Paul Eggert
Linux kernel hacker currently lecturing at UCLA.
Ralf S. Engelschall
Author of WML, ePerl, iSelect, MM, NPS, shtool and Pth. Core Apache team member, including contributing mod_ssl, mod_rewrite and APACI.
Fred Fish
Early (1980s) distributor of free and public domain software, mostly for the Amiga. The "Fish Disks" were a great number of people's introduction to the world of free software and prompted many of them to go on to contribute themselves. Also ported GNU software to the Amiga and BeOS.
Olivier Fourdan
Author of XFce, a lightweight and easily configurable environment for X11.
Fractint Team
The people behind fractint, a wonderful fractal-visualization tool for DOS. Fractint was developed collaboratively over compuserve and internet email long before "open source" was even two words next to each other. This group is also responsible for the "Stone Soup" characterization of open source.
FreeBSD Team
The folks behind FreeBSD.
Bill Gates
I have to believe someone was trying to be funny. Chairman and CEO of the oft-villified Microsoft Corporation.
John Gilmore
co-founder of Cygnus, reintegrator of gdb, open source and cryptography activist.
Andi Gutmans
PHP Core team member and Zend author
Chuck Hagenbuch
Author of IMP, an IMAP<->Web system based on PHP.
Carsten Haitzler
aka "Rasterman" - one of the two people behind the Enlightenment window manager. (and Imlib, Eeyes, etc.)
Charles Hannum
NetBSD core developer.
Shawn Hargreaves
Main author of the Allegro graphics/sound/input/etc library for DJGPP.
Geoff Harrison
aka "Mandrake", one of the two people behind the Enlightenment window manager.
Mike Heins
Creator of Minivend, free software-based e-commerce. Also responsible for the CGI::Imagemap perl module
Joey Hess
Major contributor to Debian. Maintainer of the program "Alien" which allows one, as much as is possible, to use binary packages from one GNU/Linux distribution on other distributions.
Earl Hood
Author of several perl and perl-based tools, among them MHonArc, a mail to html converter. Also maintains the perlWWW and perlSGML indices.
Jordan K. Hubbard
One of the core FreeBSD team members. Whenever you see cathair.freebsd.org:/USR/SRC/SYS/COMPILE in your dmesg, that's him.
Dan Ingalls
One of the founders of Smalltalk (with Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg)
Lars Mange Ingebrigtsen
Author of GNUS, the emacs news/mail reader.
Kyle Jones
Author of VM, the Emacs mail reader.
Bill Joy
CTO for Sun; invented vi, Jini, and many other things.
Alexandre Julliard
Maintainer of Wine.
Mike Karels
Major figure in early BSD development.
Jeremy Katz
Involved heavily in icecast and was one of the founders of linuxpower.org.
Spencer Kimball
One of the two creators of the gimp and its widget set gtk. Linuxworld has this interview with him.
Donald Knuth
Author of TeX, (and associated tools) the typesetting software. Author of one of the all-time classic computer science textbooks. He also created a sadly-underutilized system for literate programming called "Web".
Werner Koch
The main person behind gnupg.
Alfredo Kenji Kojima
Author of the window manager WindowMaker.
Jeffrey A. Law
One of the top people of egcs development.
Patrick Lenz
Aka "Scoop", the person behind freshmeat.
Marc Lehmann
Maintainer of pgcc; also has a few gimp plugins to his name.
Rasmus Lerdorf
Created the PHP language and also an Apache core team member.
Mark Linton
Lead developer of dbx, InterViews, and Fresco.
MRTG Team
The people behind MRTG, a tool to visualize network traffic.
Paul Mackerras
One of the co-writers of rsync. One of the people involved with the AP/Linux project.
Peter Mattis
One of the two creators of the gimp and its widget set gtk. Linuxworld has this interview with him.
Doug McEachern
Lead author and maintainer of Apache's mod_perl, offerring superior perl integration with the Apache web server.
Caolán McNamara
Author of wvWare (formerly MSWordView); general WindowsMetaFile-related hacking.
Kirk McKusick
Major figure in BSD development. He contributed an account of the early history of BSD the O'Reilly's "OpenSources" book.
Bram Moolenaar
The lead developer of vim, a text editor in the spirit of vi.
Tobias Oetiker
One of the people behind the Multi Router Traffic Grapher. Also the author of several other tools.
Olivetti Research Laboratories
The creators of VNC (Virtual Network Computing, a remote display system) and omniORB (a small and fast CORBA implementation). Note that since the start of 1999 they haven't existed as "Olivetti Research Laboratories" but as "AT&T Labs Cambridge".
Tim O'Reilly
CEO of O'Reilly & Associates, publishers of documentation for various computer systems. Also, publisher of much of the existing documentation for free software systems.
John Ousterhout
Created the Tcl programming language.
PHP Project
All of the people behind PHP, a language for server-side web scripting/web-database interaction.
Dave Rand
One of the people behind the Multi Router Traffic Grapher.
Brian Paul
Developer of Mesa, the OpenGL clone.
Nicholas Petreley
Journalist; colunmist for linuxworld and infoworld, The editor of NC World before it went broke.
Bernhard Rosenkraenzer
Aka "bero", the guy behind berolinux and beroftp.
Alessandro Rubini
Wrote Linux Device Drivers, notable linux driver book.
SGI
Silicon Graphics Inc. In addition to their more conventional software and hardware activities, they do development work on the linux kernel, have released their XFS journaling filesystem under the GPL and have open-source'ed GLX.
Dr Douglas Schmidt
Lead developer of ACE; long time contributor of open source code, including GPERF and a high performance CORBA 2.2 compliant ORB. Frequently gives patient answers to questions on the ACE, TAO, and CORBA users' newsgroups.
Keith Sklower
Wrote RFCs 1717 and 1969, which define the PPP Multilink Protocol and PPP DES Protocol. (But there must be more - what does this have to do with free software?)
W. Richard Stevens
(deceased) author of books on network programming, best written works on internet protocols for those not interested in sifting through RFC's.
Darryl Strauss
Maintainer of glide for GNU/Linux. Works at Precision Insight doing accelerated 3D for XFree.
Zeev Suraski
PHP Core team member and Zend author
Danny ter Haar
CEO of Cistron and author of init. Active in the Dutch Domain Registry and a lobbyist.
Andrew Tridgell
Famous Samba developer, employed by SGI; head of the Samba project.
Jorrit Tyberghein
The person behind Crystal Space, a portable 3D engine. betabites has this interview with him.
Bert Tyler
Original creator of fractint.
Guido van Rossum
Created the Python programming language. (Larry Wall says the Dr. Dobbs prize Mr. van Rossum won this past year doesn't affect the FSF's award)
Miquel van Smoorenburg
Wrote several utilities, as well as Cistron's Radius software. (Cistron's ftp site contains much of his stuff)
Wietse Venema
Author of several security packages, most notably TCP Wrappers; co-author of the network scanning tool SATAN. Author of Postfix, the latest free-software mailer that everyone's talking about.
Paul Vixie
Author of "Vixie cron", the standard cron against which all others are measured. Also the primary author of bind. Anti-spam activist.
Patrick Volkerding
Slackware distribution maintainer
Tim Wegner
Graphics guru; one of the developers in the Fractint group and also one of the people behind POV-Ray. Creator of the PNG format.
Jim Winstead
PHP Core team member
Jamie Zawinski
Developer of Lucid Emacs (xemacs), former lead programmer of Mozilla, originator of the "no magic pixie-dust" characterization of open source.
He also wrote xscreensaver and several other X programs.
Phil Zimmerman
The man behind pgp; cryptography activist.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Daniel Martin for doing such a fine job in compiling this list.

Thanks to:

Disclaimer

This information is taken from Daniel Martin's website. FSF makes no claims of correctness for the information, and does not endorse the sites and organizations whose web pages are linked to.

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Updated: 3 Dec 2000 tower