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Candidates for 1999 GNU Free Software Award
Malcolm Spence wrote in to tell us that gnu.org has posted a list of nominees for their 1999 Free Software award. Includes lots of names you would expect and a few that maybe you wouldn't.
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Ok, how has he helped the Open source movement, other than by uniting them in a common cause against MS?
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How and Why??
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.12 GIT d? s: a-- C++++ UL++++ P++ L+++ E- W++ N o-- K- w--- O- M+ V PS+ P
A worthy candidate, methinks.
Should I take it that the argument behind naming Bill Gates as a candidate is something like:
I don't expect him to win, but this outcome does offer incredibly entertaining opportunities for the awards dinner.
I'm sure they'd be eating cream pies at that dinner...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Why was he nominated? Did I miss something? What does he have to do with free software?
Eugene.
Funny, all the names that are important to me are on the award committee! Go FSF!
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
I for one would like to see DJ Delorie win the award. Anyone who brings development tools like gcc to Windows is cool in my book. Now that I think about it, DJGPP was the first piece of GNU software that I ever used. Ah...t'was so long ago...
Huh? These guys are going to come to an agreement about free software?
Wow.
314-15-9265
I really like see Kirk McKusick, Bill Joy, Jordan K. Hubbard, Theo DeRaadt, and Mike Karels on the list. These are all people who have done far more for free software than anyone gives credit for. I'd really like to see anyone of them win.
B) Debian is cool. So what if it doesn't have the latest kernel? It's arguably the most stable and well-designed of the Linux distributions; certainly the most "BSD-ish".
"Take what you can use and let the rest go by." (Ken Kesey)
"Hand in hand, we copy foreigners' merits and compensate our shortcomings." (Fong Sai Yuk) There are flashier contributions from individuals and groups, but personally when I think Linux I think "Debian", on both technical and philosophical grounds.
Fuck Slashdot
It's inevitable when lists like this are announced that people will take up bandwidth saying 'thank you' to people they've never met.
Far be it from me to spit in the face of such tradition.
Free software has made my life as a sysadmin immeasurably easier, thanks to the lovely people who were nominated (or who won previously). If it were possible, I'd invite you all around to my place for a mug of coffee and to play with my Mindstorms. But it's not, so I'll just say that it's thanks to you all that I've got time most days to post to slashdot.
FINALLY, THE ROCK IS COME BACK TO /.!!!!!!!
ROODY POO!!!!!!!!!!!!1
HE IS THE MOST ELECTRIFYING MAN IN SPORTS ENTERTAINMENT TODAY!!!!!!!1
Although most of us here at /. are using Linux, xBSD, or some other form of Unix, the Microsoft world is still the fundamental majority. Delorie's port of GCC to MSDOS, and all the derivatives thereof, played a monunmental role in the development of free software ports in the DOS world. Without his contributions, none of this would have been possible.
On that note: Wasn't the original Quake for DOS written using DJ's gcc?
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Moving beyond blind advocacy is essential for any movement like OSS. Of all the people on the list (except Bill G, who I suspect is on the list as a joke), jwz seems to me the best example of this.
Tim O'Reilly is my second choice. Thanks to him, OSS has a real voice out there in the publishing community. There's nothing to impress your boss like a large number of Linux books next to all the "Be an MCSE in 30 days!" crap at Barnes and Noble. Besides, hard copies make me smile.
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Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
I recognize a lot of these names, but not nearly all of them. I'd love to see a list of what they've done that merits their nominations. It would be nice reading. In particular, I'd like to read Bill Gates' entry. Now look, some wise guy's going to point to Freshmeat...
Runners up were:
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I'd vote for Miguel de Icaza. I saw him present the works of Gnome again this year at the ALS. From what has happened in one year, it looks like he has the amazing ability to convert caffeine to freely distributable code. I heard that Mexico is now using Linux in public schools, perhaps in great part in his ability to rally developers with his inspiration.
Assuming he wins, what kind of prize would he get?
A bag of scorpions?
A bear trap, ready to go?
A super glue coated bowling ball?
A package with a concealed taser, aimed at his testicles?
George
They should give the award to Microsoft... posthumously. :-)
human://billy.j.mabray/
human://billy.j.mabray/
"Every good system has a backup." -- Dale Hanchey
I too am puzzled about Bill Gates on the list, but I am also very glad to see Mandrake/Raster on the list (not to mention Becker, Vixie, etc)..
I'm pulling for the Enlightenment boys on this one.. Better window managers make managing evil networks so much easier. I know there are candidates that *may* be more deserving of the award, but they have chosen to fight for the power of good, which just doesn't sit too well with me.
- Darth Sidious | Chairman / CEO |Dark Jedi Network Services | http://www.dark-jedi.net
Many worthy candidates there!
:set syntax syntax simply rules.
Nice to see Raster, Mandrake and Alfredo Kojima on the list as they have produced some of the most stunning visual and usable user interfaces.
Thanks a lot folks!
And some other good candidates are off course Miguel. I use Midnight Commander every single day, can't be without it. Without even mentioning the effort he has put into GNOME.
Bram Molenaar is on the list too. Vim with
There are some other less heard of people on the list too. Much of their work is less visible than the GUI teams do, but they shouldn't be forgotten because they provide the infrastructure other people build on.
I nominated Lennart Augustsson, because of the USB code. USB is a large, useful, piece of work, allowing free software to maintain device-driver parity with a lot of the commercial world.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Actually, Kirk McKusick, Bill Joy, Jordan Hubbard, Theo DeRaadt and Mike Karels are all on the list, at least when I last checked. (Maybe GNU added them?)
Personally, though, I'd like to vote for W. Richard Stevens, in memory of his great books.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
I've not been paying attention to the previous years' awards. Do we vote? Do they vote? Is a name pulled out of a hat?
(Personally, I'd vote for either W. Richard Stevens (RIP), or Jeffrey Law.)
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
If they could format the names in some readable way instead of just in one big blob-o-text.
Also, a more detailed description of what the perosn has done would help.
But they do it all for free, so who am I to complain?
Apart from BG - which I assume was a joke :)
Fred Fish - who single handedly (OK, so there were other contributors, but he was the fighting force) brought the GNU tools to both the Amiga and now BeOS.
Rasmus Lerdorf and the PHP Project, but only Doug McEachern and not the mod_perl Project (i.e. all those cool module authors and other significant contributors). I thought that was a little strange.
Great to see some relative unknowns (but significant talent) in there like James Clark.
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
...for writing some very interesting articles on Segfault about individuals in the Free Software community.
I propose that a special prize be awarded, just for her: PETRIFICATION !!!
Write to these people TODAY and DEMAND that Mae Ling Mak be included, and that the special petrification prize be established! For a better world! Rally round this banner! Our voices shall be HURD!
I didn't see any of the names from the GPG team there, which I think is a shame. GPG is really, really important - free access to strong encryption might define privacy for the next decade, or longer.
When and how did nominations take place?
-bc
-bc
Bill Gates being on the list has to be someone I would not expect to see. Is be secretly involved in some open source movement that I do not know about. The only thing that Bill has done that can be considered remotely good for open source would be the a donataion to MIT but it was to just MIT and the guys has shitloads of money (which he got all from closed source software). Surely his nomination was meant as a joke- but posting it is going to fall. I do not have anything personally against Bill but he represents exactly what the fsf/open source is trying to move away from.
Ah, ok... I had read your original post as "I['d] really like [to] see", rather than "I really like see[ing]". Oops. :-)
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
We were little more than a lesser-known fringe before Bill G and Microsoft argued in court that were were a force to be reckoned with. Surely Bill G and Microsoft are owed a huge debt of gratitude from the Free Software community for all the free advertising both in the courtroom and in their FUD-spreading campaigns that have helped Linux become a household name. I just hope you have the cojones to show up to accept the award, Bill.
But it's too early for this year's award, maybe after the whole deal is done with. You don't have to be a programmer to contribute, right?
OMG, I feel so clueless. I never knew DJ Delorie made anything other than a solitaire/freecell clone for Linux/Xwindows called Ace of Penguins! For my girlfriend, this has been one of the "killer apps" for Linux.
When I first installed Linux on my home PC, my girlfriend was so mad because she couldn't play Solitaire and Freecell anymore (I didn't know about WINE at the time). So we made a deal - if I could find a way for her to play those games, then she wouldn't fuss about me keeping Linux on the PC. DJ Delorie's "Ace of Penguins" came through for me, and the rest is history.
So I guess both the techies (DJGPP) and the home users (like my gf and myself) have DJ Delorie to thank for some great pieces of free software. He is definitely a worthy selection.
Also rooting for SGI, John Ousterhout, Jon Katz!! for making us sick.
I mean, I recognize the big names on there, but most of the people I just don't recognize at all.
If no one knows of a better idea, I've started the process of making a bare-bones list at http://math.jhu.edu/~martind/fsflist.html - I suspect that someone else will have a better reference, but it's a start. (at the moment the list doesn't even contain all the descriptions of the people I know about)
It's "hear, hear" you fewl.
"I all ever wanted to know I learned from a man page."
Well.... not really. Sometimes to learn a topic you need a quality book in front of you. No one puts out more quality books, on topics that matter to the open source populace, as O'Reilly has. I've never read an O'Reilly book that I didn't like.... I can't say the same for the other "Using Foo in 14 days for Dummies" publishers.
Quoth the Penguin, "pipe grep more!"
Many respected names on the list. The one stand-out is Miguel de Icaza. Yes he is famous for the prodigious amounts of software which he personally generates--no one on the list comes close in this category. But beyond his Herculean coding achievements with such major projects as Gnome and Midnight Commander, Miguel is a master manger. He has a personality that can smoothly coordinate and motivate others without generating controversy or rancor. And his ability to influence public policy is probably unparalleled. Largely through his efforts, the Mexican educational system will have over a million Linux based computers running by the end of next year. A marvelous accomplishment, and a fitting way to usher in the new millennium. My vote goes for Miguel! ~
Many of the other people on the list would not be there if not for Fred Fish.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
I am l33t! wit My skillz I hAv creeted this l33t skriptt:
print SLASHDOT "$n th Post! LUZERS!\n";
f3ea3r my skillz and slashd0t automating skillZx
I can't spell or type, but that doesn't mean I'm unusually stupid.
As the conversation reaches critical mass surrounding Bill Gates, and how he has united hackers everywhere to write ``software that doesn't suck'', I'd like to take this time to point out to you the man whom I nominated.
Tim Berners-Lee
Why him, you may ask? Well, while he did not invent the Internet (neither did Al Gore, for that matter), he did invent the World Wide Web, which popularized the Internet (which has existed for a long time in some form or another).
Now you might be asking: who the hell cares? Easy. You know all those free software projects, where do you read about them? In the newspaper? On television? On.. the Web, maybe? The World Wide Web is the primary agitant that prompted the utter explosion of growth of the Internet. The network and the Web are what free software developers use to coordinate their efforts all across the world. Would we be able to achieve this sort of teamwork without it? Hell no.
Not only that, the Web itself is free speech. Tim is also the director of the W3C, which standardizes HTML, the Web, and lots of other neat nifty things like CSS, etc. etc. If this doesn't represent a strong and continued contribution to the world of free software in the most fundamental, earth-shattering, awe-inspiring way possible I don't know what the hell is.
In short, if they pick anyone else, they better give me a good damn reason why. Otherwise I'm going to wonder about these people. Seriously.
~ Kish
in the field of being turned to stone!!!
I've never liked Windows, from day one. I grew up on the ancient Apple II, then during the "IBM days" switched to DOS 3. In my mind, DOS at least did what it was supposed to do, and did it well. (Mostly because it was easily sidestepped :-)
Then out came Win3.1. I despised it, and basically stayed away from it. Then came Win95. I hated it to the uttermost. I loved DOS then, because at least it let me do what I wanted to do. Win95 imposed all kinds of silly restrictions on me in the name of "protection" yet does not let me do what I wanted to do. I stuck with DOS as long as I could, then realized that it was the end of the road.
Then someone introduced me to Linux. Being ignorant that anything existed outside MS then, I was reluctant to leave DOS (though I couldn't care crap about winbloxe) to use the then-difficult-to-install Linux. Besides, I knew from using Solaris at school that Linux will have memory protection and stuff, which meant I couldn't play with hardware I/O as I've done in DOS.
But then I realized that protection was good, when it was done right. Wincrap for sure didn't do it right -- the "protection" it gives is extremely flakey, and it doesn't give anything in return. Linux gave real protection -- and gave immense power at the same time. From that time on, it was bye-bye windows all the way. I still had win95 on another partition then, but after my HD crashed, my new HD is completely Linux. Not once have I regretted this decision. No more will MS crapware pollute my system! :-)
-- Happy Linuxer
mikre he sophia he tou Mikrosophou.
...duh only jive-talkin' Linux distro aroun'!
I was pleasantly surprised to notice that Dr. Douglas Schmidt has been nominated. For those unfamiliar with Dr. Schmidt, he's a software engineering professor at the university of Washington. He's the head of the ACE project, which is an open-source cross-platform C++ toolkit for network applications.
His group has also developped TAO, which is an open-source real-time CORBA orb that was built using ACE. It's really cool stuff. Check it out here.
-- Will quantum computers run imaginary-time operating systems?
Who are these people, what do they do, interests, homepages? If you have some extra disk space (lots!) unpack the source of your favorite distribution(s) and grep for the names. Viewing source is viewing art and can inspire. Search engines such as google are also good at bringing up the home pages of those in question.
So,... do you want to invalidate a candidate? Give him an award and send him $20.00. poof! he's ineligible.
Ineligibility on having received this particular award, I can understand. Ineligibility because you've received OTHER awards is dumb.
'nuff said
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
It would be nice to see some more info on the nominees and not just a list of names.
Whose participating in this thing anyway?
I thought free software was NOT about free beer. It seems to be just that for the few egomaniacal self-promoters who are "better than Bill."
By free beer, I don't mean software either. It's the self promotion that annoys me.
There's nothing wrong with making money, or doing good deeds for goodness sake, but this award thing just reeks of a planned promotion of one man.
You tell me they haven't already picked the winner?
Why call it a competition when it's just a PR venture to promote one of their buddies?
You know, like authors who have their friends write glowing promos in the back of their books, and then next year they return the favor by writing glowing promos for those same buddies.
I like awards and I like competition. I wish we had some in the free software camp.
Ok, so they want an award! Great!
Now why didn't they do it this more seriously?
I mean are they on drugs or something?
All linux developers are worthy of being nominated! Hell, Linux developers are those who have helped most the GNU spirit, after Linux companies (they did it with the suits).
The only serious way to do this is to include all known developers, market people of the GNU world, be it Bob Young, Alan Cox, Linux Torvalds, Eric Raymond, Caldera Folks, Debian, *Bsd* etc.....
Only then should be a general vote on who gets the most vote based on a one year activity.
Other than that, you are only making a joke of yourselves and GNU in general!
Man, Bill Gates?
Who in Hell or Heaven actually typed his name on that website?!!! This guy/girl should stop taking drugs while working!
The kernel needs a Gtk/Gnome-based post-install device configuration tools "a la" make xconfig. (Better sig coming soon
(first I just can't help but think.. mochaone responds to one of my comments and isn't flaming me? wow)
You could be right about the 1999 thing, but I don't know. I doubt it, but to be fair, I haven't looked into it. However, I might point out that Tim still is the director of the W3C as we speak (here in 1999), and as such contributes to free software and open standards (which help free software) in a very real-time sense. It's not as if he just built the Web and wandered off somewhere to live in a cave. He's probably one of the most vital assets to our community, and certainly one of the least talked about (relatively speaking in accordance with what he's done).
This is not to belittle the efforts of others, but we should probably throw some credit on over to the man who made all of this possible in a way that rivals what other key movers and shakers in the free software community have done (such as RMS).
The Web is the platform we use to voice our ideas, share information, and coordinate our efforts. Truly a Good Thing.
~ Kish
The excitement surrounding this year's announcement is huge. Although many of the candidates are worthy I think Alan Cox really stands out. The guy is a one man wrecking crew when it comes to kernel hacking.
I am not trolling here
KDE changed the desktop on Unix/Linux.
Troll is extremely cool company. They offered Qt for free long before Linux was "cool" in the media and were very supportive of KDE projects.
Are you paying attention, Bruce? I sure hope so! ;)
Of course, I just have to wonder if anyone besides me nominated the guy..
~ Kish
I'm really glad to see the Rasterman and Mandrake on there, as well as that GNOME guy. I mean, lets face it: the thing that makes free software a viable bussines solution is the fact that there are many users, and when trying to convert users to use *BSD or Linux, lets face it, all they do is compare GUIs. They don't really care about memory managment or mulit-tasking or free compilers. all they care about is something that looks perty and that they can play Quake on, and i think that Enlightenment and GNOME to a very good job of makeing the free Unix variants atarctive to winblows 69 users, even for no other reason, because it increases the number of raw users.
--bsDaemon
--dfree@inna.net
the beowulf guys?
My vote would be for Miguel de Icaza. Bill Gates is definitly tempting though. :P
Maybe Willie G will win because everyone votes for him as a joke. I think I'd laugh my tushie off if that ever happened
If you think you know what the hell is really going on you're probably full of shit.
If you think you know what the hell is really going on you're probably full of shit.
jdube is who I am.
This is the ghost of Ralph Clark.
When I saw Bill Gates' name on that list I laughed so much I inadvertently swallowed my tongue and choked to death.
Er...I got better...
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Personally, while I don't think they should win because they're a relative newcomer to the movement (and people like Becker/Fred Fish/DJ have been working for the cause for much longer), I'm very happy to see SGI being nominated. Of all the companies that have joined the Linux bandwagon, they seem the be the largest one that "gets it". While I may not always agree with what they do or plan to do, I'm glad to see them nominated because they should get some recognition for wat they're doing.
Happy owner of a $650 Indigo2, soon to be running Linux,
PM.
- --
"I Hate Quotes" -- Samuel L. Clemens
I'd actually like to see Darryl Strauss win. My personal opinion is that Darryl is the sole reason we are getting commercial 3D game development on Linux in the first place. Gimme a break here, we wouldn't have Linux Q3A without him (at least not this soon).
Without his 3Dfx drivers, 3D support in Linux at the time the decision to do versions for Linux would consist of a Permedia driver and a buggy G200/G400 driver. Darryl created a stable set of drivers for hardware 3D support, even if it had to be under an NDA. He has, however, released the source to any parts of his drivers that 3Dfx's legal department will let him.
He, don't forget the great work Andrea is doing! Both Alan and Andrea are doing good things (TM)...
according to the web page: "but whatever the activity, we want to recognize long-term central contributions to the development of the world of free software."
Stevens would still be enriching our knowledge of network programming if he were with us.
and the 1999 FSF ass kissing award goes to... JMC
It would have been rather unlikely for Matrox to have released the G200/G400 docs that they did if it weren't for the pre-existance of Darryl's voodoo support. Same with ATI and (to an extent) Nvidia.
:)
But this list has a lot of people who have made incredible contributions to free software, what a shame to have to pick only one
He's the KDE founder and was nominated.
Those guys do great work.
Why has a discussion of Candidates for 1999 GNU Free Software Award turned into a Microsoft hate rally?
Certainly a portion of the comments in the discussion are on-topic, but it seems like almost half of the discussion is back on the old hate-Microsoft thread.
It's really sad.
why'd they nominate bill joy(of sun?)
what has sun or he done done for Open Source Software recently?
ObOffTopic: What ever happened to Apple's take on Unix, aka A/UX?
Anyone have that disk? :-) Ahh I remeber those days. Checking Amazing Computing each month to see what disk FF was up to. Amiga we loved you. Jay Miner R.I.P.
Thank you all for your continuous and generous efforts!
Maybe we'll face a 'grave of the unknown [not only]GNU contributor' someday...
Use The Source, Luke!
I don't claim to speak for the whole project, but on behalf of _this_ debian developer, thanks to everyone who nominated us.
Andrew G. Feinberg
It would be a cold day in hell if TOR won. RMS has let fly against the company on more than one occasion.
Mike Heins is a behind-the-scenes man in the Open Source revolution. His creation, Minivend, is a powerful e-commerce package that's released under the GPL. He's shown many business the power of free software. He allows the improvements his clients hire him to make to Minivend to be incorporated into the free distribution. The clients benefit from the their tailored enhancements and the community benifits from an ever improving product. Mike Heins is living the Open Source business model and quietly spreading the Open Source ideal.
Alfredo rulez :)
Serena Del Bianco
I can understand why all those other names are there. I support Olivetti Research Lab(ORL), now AT for giving us VNC, the wonderful little piece of software. But some names simply should not be there...like:
James Clark: Give me a break, folks. What does this guy have to do with free software? Opening up Netscape source code was little more than a corporate maneuver to outsmart MS, IMHO, but look at where Netscape market share is now. Netscape still deserves a special award for being the only piece of software that's able to crash my Linux boxen, though. Show me a popular, usable open source project that was derived from Mozilla code and I will show you vaporware.
John Ousterhout: I guess Berkeley and Sun paid real low salaries, no? There are people who created languages that are far more popular than yours, Sir, but do they have a company? No. Not that it is a bad thing to make profit off your own creation...Either Ousterhout does not belong to the this list, or Larry Wall was really dumb not to go out on his own and start a company to make a fortune out of Perl. He would have showed up on the free software celebrities list anyway.
Zigbee Central: A Zigbee weblog
I was going to say something but decided against it. So let me just say there are persons more worthy.
***Beginning*of*Signiture***
Linux? That's GNU/Linux to you mister!
It's great to see Alfredo Kojima get some recognition. He gets so little hype compared to some other UI folks, but IMHO he's responsible for one of the most usable and best-designed free software projects out there.
(WindowMaker for those who don't know what I'm referring to...)
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
He's the obvious choice. He was so committed to source code availability that he ensured everyone had a copy of his program. What could be free-er than that?
Rich Stevens should win! you know why? coz he educated ALMOST all unix systems and network programmer in the world right now! that's why! What UNIX/TCP/IP programming book is in the desktop of almost all UNIX/tcp/ip programmers right now? i know wut: 1) APUE 2) TCPv1 3) TCPv2 4) TCPv3 5) UNP (1990 1st edition) 6) UNPv1 (2nd edition) 7) UNPv2 goddamnit this books are the product of hardwork and tremendous UNIX programming skills and is being used as THE bible of all UNIX programmers!! it's also a great tribute for an amazing man who contributed ALOT to the UNIX community - he taught us the value of hardwork. he certainly is the inspiration for every unix programmer... My respect to Rich Stevens and to his family..
I think there is a second Jim Clark... Not the guy who started Netscape.
He's the guy who did the XML support and/or layout engine in Mozilla. I think he lives in Thailand too.
I'm not sure if what he wrote technically qualifies as free software, because I don't know about the license that was on the original PGP, but think about it...PGP deserves something, even if it's past the time when he should have gotten an award.
A good program that you could get the source code to - the first psycho-strong crypto program that I remember that ran on the PC. It might not have been the first, but it was certainly one of the best and it brought "Encryption for the masses" which I remember seeing as a tagline in practically all the README's that came with PGP.
Ahhh..how fondly I remember my pre-win 3.1 DOS days where I would sit about as a total newbie trying to figure out how the hell to use the 10,000 command line switches in PGP.
Anybody have specific info on the license of the original PGP source?
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
If you do you see there are FOUR jpgs of just Stallman - and he's not that pretty! Its a self promotion fest alright.
Why not? I don't use or like WindowMaker. It's a crap, unstable, buggy.
For my money, it has to be the Apache Group. Nothing, not even Linux has done more for free softwear than Apache - sure Linux gets the press, and deserves it, but Apache is the killer app that has kept Unix relevent in a lot of places through the rise of NT.
Now we can say we are in the Post-Microsoft era (isn't it great to be able to say that?) Apache deserves credit for being the one piece of softwear that managed to gain marketshare when faced with MS giving away a direct competitor - IIS.
Not even Linux can claim that, and what is more, many would claim that the success of Apache has been on of the main reasons why MS has not successed in the Internet age.
People will look back on 1997-1999 in years to come, and talk about how Microsoft had destroyed Netscape (their previous competitor in the server business), but couldn't beat Apache - everything IIS could do, Apache could do, plus it could run on better hardware because of its openness.
What is more, Apache isn't created by the coding "Stars", but by a group of (reletitivly) human coders, and as such must be the best proof of the success of open source software
--Donate food by clicking: www.thehungersite.com
OK, I have the most original reason: The serial :)
port on my Amiga stopped working. I ran out and
got some hardware nobody was using, installed an
850MB harddrive and Slackware. Didn't really take
too many hours setting it up properly, either
(I even got it reading the Amiga filesystem after
my first kernel compile!)
He may not have written much free software, but he was responsible for most of the FREE OPEN protocols that we use today, his editorial duties continued until his death last year. His name is up in the right corner of most of the core Internet protocols. Perhaps a posthumous award to Jon Postell and W Richard Stevens is in order.
They have done a great job that affects all people in the free-software community. And not only someting that is Linux only, but everyone can benefit from, freesoftware community, education community, commercial companys, By pushing the development of the most important piece of software we have. The GCC C/C++ compiler.
I outlined precisely what he has done for free software. The guidelines for the award specifically state that the person who wins need not have written a single line of code. It says that they must have contributed to free software somehow. I certainly think enabling it to be developed in such a distributed manner counts. Somehow, I don't feel I am utterly alone in these thoughts.
Perhaps I confused with my references to free speech? Well, last I checked, not just free software may be considered free speech or free beer, unless, of course, you want to tell me that the only reason we have the word gratis is because of free software, because, you know, that would be quite an irony.
In short, I'd like to stress that I never stated he wrote free software, simply that he has contributed to free software (as a community, a development process, a movement, whatever.. the creation thereof.. etc.). Whether or not he deserves the award this time around, or ever, is up for debate. Whether or not what I'm saying here is true most certainly is not.
Sorry, but I disapprove of the insinuation that I'm clueless. =P
~ Kish