Nominations for The Free Software Awards Are Now Open

The Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project have announced the opening of nominations for the 15th annual Free Software Awards.

The Free Software Awards also includes the Award for the Advancement of Free Software and the Award for Projects of Social Benefit.

The award is presented on an annual basis by the President of The Free Software Foundation, Richard Stallman, to someone that has made a great contribution to the progress and development of free software.

In 2011, the winner of The Free Software Award was Yukihiro Matsumoto. He is credited with the invention of Ruby programming language and over two decades of contributions to GNU.

The Award for Projects of Social Benefit is presented to a project or team that is recognized for the application of free software, or the ideas of the free software movement.

“This award stresses the use of free software in the service of humanity. We have deliberately chosen this broad criterion so that many different areas of activity can be considered. However, one area that is not included is that of free software itself. Projects with a primary goal of promoting or advancing free software are not eligible for this award (we honor those projects with our annual Award for the Advancement of Free Software),” stated The Free Software Foundation.

In the past years, the award was won by a lot of famous teams, including Tor, the Internet Archive, Creative Commons, Groklaw, the Sahana project, and Wikipedia.

The winners are not eligible for participation, but previous nominees are encouraged to participate again. Award recipients will be chosen by a committee of previous winners and FSF president Richard Stallman.

Information about the previous awards can be found at http://www.fsf.org/awards. Winners will be announced at an awards ceremony at the LibrePlanet conference tentatively scheduled for March 2013, in Boston, Massachusetts.