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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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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.
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
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.
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."
Ok, how has he helped the Open source movement, other than by uniting them in a common cause against MS?
Maybe it's a joke? But if it's not, I'd really love to see him win for precicely the reason you mentioned.
"Ladies and Gentlemen, the this year the award goes to a villain so evil, so crapulent that he's brought us all together. His shitty software is a clarion call to aesthetic programmers everywhere, and we'd like to take this opportunity to embrace Bill and extend the hand of friendship to a man without whom we would all be a bunch of anarchists ranting about the CIA on streetcorners.
"Ladies and Gentlemen... Bill Gates"
But would he accept the award in person or just send Ballmer along?
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.
They should give the award to Microsoft... posthumously. :-)
human://billy.j.mabray/
human://billy.j.mabray/
"Every good system has a backup." -- Dale Hanchey
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.
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
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.
What happens next is at some point in the near future, the award committee sits down and considers all the nominees and selects a winner based in part by the comments that was received together with the nominations. After that we'll probably see an award ceremony before long.
You should be able to find people working on GNU software on the GNU Who's Who List.
Tim B-L should get some sort of honor. I'd want to look a little harder at how much of what he's done for Open Systems rather than free software. A lot of people confuse the two.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
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...
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