Ruby creator Matz wins Free Software Award

At the Free Software Foundation's Libre Planet conference in Boston, Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto, the inventor of the Ruby language, was honoured with the Award for the Advancement of Free Software. Luis Falcon received the FSF's Award for Projects of Social Benefit on behalf of GNU Solidario for its GNU Health project.

Matsumoto, who designed the Ruby programming language and has worked on Emacs in the past, received the award for his work in free software projects over the last 20 years. In receiving the award, he joins fellow programming language creators Larry Wall, Guido van Rossum and Theo de Raadt on the list of honoraries as well as many other distinguished names in the open source community.

The GNU Health project, which designs hospital information software, that has been adopted by the United Nations University among others, received the Social Benefits award for its work "with health professionals around the world to improve the lives of the underprivileged." Previous winners of this award include Wikipedia, Creative Commons and the Internet Archive.

The awards, which are given out annually at the Libre Planet conference, were presented by FSF president Richard Stallman.

(fab)