This year's Free Software Awards recipients are Andy Wingo, Alx Sa, and Govdirectory.
Andy Wingo is the 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 in accordance with the spirit of software freedom.
Andy is one of the co-maintainers of GNU Guile, the official extension language of the GNU operating system and the Scheme "backbone" of GNU Guix. Upon receiving the award, he stated: "Since I learned about free software, the vision of a world in which hackers freely share and build on each others' work has been a profound inspiration to me, and I am humbled by this recognition of my small efforts in the context of the Guile Scheme implementation. I thank my co-maintainer, Ludovic Courtès, for his comradery over the years: we are just building on the work of the past maintainers of Guile, and I hope that we live long enough to congratulate its many future maintainers."
The 2024 Award for Outstanding New Free Software Contributor went to Alx Sa for work on the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP). When asked to comment, Alx responded: "I am honored to receive this recognition! I started contributing to the GNU Image Manipulation Program as a way to return the favor because of all the cool things it's allowed me to do. Thanks to the help and mentorship of amazing people like Jehan Pagès, Jacob Boerema, Liam Quin, and so many others, I hope I've been able to help other people do some cool new things, too."
Govdirectory was presented with this year's Award for Projects of Social Benefit, 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. Govdirectory provides a collaborative and fact-checked listing of government addresses, phone numbers, websites, and social media accounts, all of which can be viewed with free software and under a free license, allowing people to always reach their representatives in freedom.
When asked to comment on their receipt of the award, Govdirectory co-founders Jan Ainali and Albin Larsson stated: "We are honored by this recognition and are deeply humbled to be among previous winners, some of whom we depend on, especially since we feel like a young project with many more important features to add and coverage to increase before we cover all of the world. For us in Govdirectory, even though the platform itself is not primarily intended for reuse, the four freedoms are part of our ethos as we see ourselves as a small corner of the community. In times like these with a lot of mis- and disinformation, our credibility is dependent on being able to build trust, and on anyone having the freedom to inspect how the platform is built and where the data is coming from."
The FSF plans to further highlight the Free Software Award winners in a series of events scheduled for the new year to celebrate their contributions to free software. More information will be coming soon.
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 websites, located at and , are an important source of information about GNU/Linux. Donations to support the FSF's work can be made at https://donate.fsf.org. The FSF is a remote organization, incorporated in Massachusetts, US.
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