'Free Software Awards' Winners Announced: Andy Wingo, Alx Sa, Govdirectory
This week the Free Software Foundation honored Andy Wingo, Alx Sa, and Govdirectory with this year's annual Free Software Awards (given to community members and groups making"significant" contributions to software freedom):Andy Wingo is one of the co-maintainers of GNU Guile,the official extension language of the GNU operating system and theScheme "backbone" of GNUGuix. Upon receiving the award, he stated: "Since I learnedabout free software, the vision of a world in which hackers freelyshare and build on each others' work has been a profound inspirationto me, and I am humbled by this recognition of my small efforts inthe context of the Guile Scheme implementation. I thank myco-maintainer, Ludovic Courtes, for his comradery over the years: weare just building on the work of the past maintainers of Guile, and Ihope that we live long enough to congratulate its many futuremaintainers." The 2024 Award forOutstanding New FreeSoftware Contributor went to Alx Sa for work on the GNUImage Manipulation Program (GIMP). When asked to comment, Alxresponded: "I am honored to receive this recognition! I startedcontributing to the GNU Image Manipulation Program as a way to returnthe favor because of all the cool things it's allowed me to do.Thanks to the help and mentorship of amazing people like Jehan Pages,Jacob Boerema, Liam Quin, and so many others, I hope I've been ableto help other people do some cool new things, too." Govdirectory was presentedwith this year's Awardfor Projects of Social Benefit, given to a project or teamresponsible for applying free software, or the ideas of the freesoftware movement, to intentionally and significantly benefitsociety. Govdirectory provides a collaborative and fact-checkedlisting of government addresses, phone numbers, websites, and socialmedia accounts, all of which can be viewed with free software andunder a free license, allowing people to always reach theirrepresentatives in freedom... The FSF plans to further highlight the Free Software Award winnersin a series of events scheduled for the new year to celebrate theircontributions to free software.
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