03 February 2011, 13:12

Nominations open for the Free Software Awards

FSF Logo The Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the GNU Project have announced that they are now accepting nominations for this year's Free Software Awards. The annual awards recognise an individual and one project for their contributions to the progress and development of free software.

Interested parties can nominate projects that have addressed important social issues and propose people who have helped the advancement of free software over the last year for an award. Nominations for the 13th annual Free Software Awards must be sent via email and follow a required format: the email subject line must contain the name of the person or project being nominated and the body of the message must contain an explanation of why the individual or project is being nominated, along with links to relevant materials.

Previous winners of the individual award, "Award for the Advancement of Free Software", have included Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) co-founder John Gilmore, Linux kernel developer Ted Ts'o, Samba creator Andrew Tridgell, OpenBSD leader Theo de Raadt, Perl creator Larry Wall, Harald Welte of gpl-violations,org and Miguel de Icaza. Last year, the award for projects, "Award for Projects of Social Benefit" was presented to the Internet Archive, a non-profit organisation that is working to build a library of digital versions of items of cultural and historical interest.

While previous award winners are not eligible for nomination, renomination of previous nominees is encouraged. Nominations close on 16 February and winners will be announced at an awards ceremony at LibrePlanet 2011, a one-day conference taking place on 19 March in Boston, at Bunker Hill Community College (BHCC).

Further information about this year's call for nominations, including eligibility requirements, can be found in the organisation's announcement press release. Details about previous winners can be found on the FSF Awards web page.

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