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Theo de Raadt gets 2004 FSF Award
Caligari writes "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 GNU/Linux and other BSD distributions. 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.""
Looking at past winners, no doubt they all deserve it .. but what about Linus Torvalds?
Is there a reason he didnt get this award?
I don't know whether this is still the policy, but from memory they originally aimed for this award to go to people who hadn't already received other awards for their work on free software. Linus has so wouldn't be eligible.
To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem. ~ h2g2
Reading this FAQ entry should shed some light on why linus has never been, and probably will never be up for this award.
"Your admirers in the street
Got to hoot and stamp their feet
in the heat from your physique" -King Crimson
There will be a number of talks this week in Dublin, Ireland from Theo de Raadt, Henning Brauer and Ryan McBride which are open to the public and completely free of charge!
Hardly. Theo wouldn't give a free software award to RMS, perhaps, because he considers GPL licensed code to be less than Free, but RMS considers BSD-licensed code to be Free, and he's the one giving the award.
Despite their differing views on what constitutes Free Software, though, both men are largely motivated by ideology. Consider Theo's reaction to the ipf debacle, his response to the XFree86 license change, and his appeal to the community to help fight the good fight against wlan cards that require non-freely redistributable binary firmware to function. This man is every bit as committed to software freedom as RMS is.
Linus, on the other hand, has stated publically on many occasions that he sees nothing wrong with proprietary software, and uses BitKeeper (a proprietary version control solution) to manage the Linux kernel tree (rather than say, CVS or Subversion) because, in his words, "it's better".
Without passing judgement, it is very clear that Linus values convenience above principle. This is part of the reason so many Slashbots like him: he is, in their minds, "refreshingly" a-political.
Whatever their differences, RMS and Theo are both idealistic. They are primarily motivated by their desire for Freedom, not because they want to produce the best system ever (although that may be true as well).
To me, RMS giving TdR this award is absolutely appropriate, and while I didn't expect it, I'm very pleased. I would be very surprised if Linus were named, and to be honest, I would be a little disappointed.
Not that I have anything against Linus, mind you -- he's a brilliant guy -- but at the core, he's an engineer, and so awarding him for his commitment to the ideology of Free Software would go rather against the grain, imho.