Free Software Awards winners announced: Bruno Haible, code.gouv.fr, Nick Logozzo
BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA -- Saturday, May 4, 2024 -- The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announced the recipients of the 2023 Free Software Awards, which are given annually at the FSF's LibrePlanet conference to groups and individuals in the free software community who have made significant contributions to the cause for software freedom.
This year's recipients of the awards are Bruno Haible, Nick Logozzo, and the French Free Software Unit of the French government. The award ceremony was conducted both in person and virtually.
Bruno Haible was this year's winner of the Award for the Advancement of Free Software, which is given to an individual who has made a great contribution to the progress and development of free software through activities that accord with the spirit of software freedom. Haible is one of the lead contributors to and maintainer of Gnulib, a set of common software routines for other free software programs (including many parts of the GNU operating system) to utilize for the programmer's convenience. Thus, Gnulib significantly lightens the amount of prep work a programmer needs to do before beginning work on the main functionality of their program.
Bruno Haible during his award acceptance speech.
When presenting the award to Haible, FSF executive director Zoë Kooyman commented on the significance of Haible's work, saying that Haible's work enabled free software programmers around the world to focus on the main, innovative portions of their program, thus facilitating the development of more and more free software.
In his acceptance of the award, Haible said: "I've been a GNU hacker for many years. Receiving the FSF's award for the Advancement of Free Software is a great honour, because it's an honour to be mentioned in one line with Alan Cox, with Theo de Raadt, with Paul Eggert, and Jim Meyering. I receive the award for my work on GNU Gnulib. But this project is not an individual's work, it's a team effort: by Paul Eggert, Jim Meyering, Simon Josefsson, and many others."
The 2023 Award for Outstanding New Free Software Contributor went to Nick Logozzo, a university student who is the lead developer of Parabolic (not to be confused with Parabola GNU/Linux), a program for the GNU/Linux desktop that allows users to watch YouTube videos without running Google's nonfree JavaScript. In recognition of Logozzo's work, Kooyman said: "Nick's work shows that you can begin your work in the free software movement anywhere, and at any age."
Bastien Guerry, accepting on behalf of code.gouv.fr.
Upon receiving the award, Logozzo said: "It's truly been a pleasure thus far working on my applications with members of the community. From personal money management with Denaro to my audio tools such as Tagger and Parabolic, I never thought any one of these apps would have the support and popularity they currently do. [...] I'm sorry that I can not be there in person to accept this award and share more about my projects, but what I can say is that the best is yet to come!"
The French Free Software Unit of the French national government was presented with this year's Award for Projects of Social Benefit, one 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. The French Free Software Unit has made great strides in increasing the use of free software like LibreOffice into the daily departmental work of the French government, a space where nonfree software like Office365 typically dominates.
Accepting the award was Bastien Guerry from the Unit. Upon receiving the award, Guerry stated: "we want public administrations to have a voice in the free software ecosystem. By contributing directly with commits. By funding free software solutions. By awarding key maintainers. By pushing for a digital commons approach in critical free software projects. The French Free Software unit exists since 2021. [...] We take this award as an encouragement to set up more Free Software units in European countries and beyond."
Anyone can voice their support for free software in the government in France, as well as the work the French Free Software Unit does by wearing a blue hat, Guerry also explained.
A report of day 1 of the conference was published at fsf.org, and LibrePlanet continued live and in person on May 5. In the coming weeks after the conference, videos of talks will be available in the LibrePlanet video archives.
About the Free Software Foundation
The Free Software Foundation, founded in 1985, is dedicated to promoting computer users' right to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer programs. The FSF promotes the development and use of free (as in freedom) software -- particularly the GNU operating system and its GNU/Linux variants -- and free documentation for free software. The FSF also helps to spread awareness of the ethical and political issues of freedom in the use of software, and its Web sites, located at fsf.org and gnu.org, are an important source of information about GNU/Linux. Donations to support the FSF's work can be made at https://donate.fsf.org. Its headquarters are in Boston, MA, USA.
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Images by Bruno Haible and Bastien Guerry. Copyright © 2024 Free Software Foundation, Inc., licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.