Theo de Raadt presented with the 2004 Free Software Award
FSF President and founder, Richard Stallman presents this year's award to Theo de Raadt.
For recognition as founder and project leader of the OpenBSD and OpenSSH projects, Theo de Raadt's work has also led to significant contributions to other BSD distributions and GNU/Linux. Of particular note is Theo's work on OpenSSH. Theo's leadership of OpenBSD, his selfless commitment to Free Software and his advancement of network security, were cited by this year's award committee.
Every year, three finalists are nominated for the award by the Free Software Community. This year's other two finalists were Andrew Tridgell, recognized for his work as the originator of the Samba Project, and Cesar Brod, recognized for his advocacy work and leadership for the advancement of Free Software in Brazil.
Previous winners of the Free Software Award
- 2003 Alan Cox
- 2002 Lawrence Lessig
- 2001 Guido van Rossum
- 2000 Brian Paul
- 1999 Miguel de Icaza
- 1998 Larry Wall
This year's Award Committee:
- Suresh Ramasubramanian
- Raj Mathur
- Frederick Noronha
- Hong Feng
- Frederic Couchet
- Enrique A. Chaparro
- Vernor Vinge
- Larry Wall
- Alan Cox
- Peter H Salus
- Richard Stallman
The Free Software Foundation sponsors the annual Award for the Advancement of Free Software, to recognize and honor those that have made a great contribution to the progress and development of Free Software (free as in freedom as defined in the Free Software Definition), through activities that accord with the spirit of software freedom.
Any kind of activity could be eligible -- writing software, writing documentation, publishing software, even journalism -- but whatever the activity, we want to recognize long-term central contributions to the development of the world of software freedom. "Accord with the spirit" means, for example, that software, manuals or collections of them (online or on CD) must be entirely Free. Work done commercially is eligible, but we give this award to individuals, not to companies, organizations, or teams. You can support the award and the work of the Free Software Foundation here.
