14 DAY TRIAL // The Free Software Foundation sponsors the annual Award for the Advancement of Free Software, to recognize and honor those that have made a great contribution to the progress and development of Free Software, through activities that accord with the spirit of software freedom.
At the ceremony for the 2005 Free Software Awards, Richard Stallman presented Andrew Tridgell with the award for the advancement of free software.
Andrew "Tridge" Tridgell received the award as the originator and developer of the Samba project. The project reverse-engineered Microsoft's protocol used for file-sharing and print services. This allows free operating systems to fit into Microsoft Windows environments, encouraging greater use and adoption of free software. Tridgell is also responsible for rsync and code contributions to the Linux kernel.
During the time the kernel was maintained using the proprietary revision control system BitKeeper, Tridge reverse-engineered the protocol and wrote a free software client. This led BitMover Inc. to remove permission for the use of BitKeeper, the result of which is that the kernel is now developed using Git, a revision control system begun by Linus Torvalds and licensed under the GPL.
Previous winners of the Free Software Award:
2004 Theo de Raadt - founder and project leader of the OpenBSD and OpenSSH projects 2003 Alan Cox - for work advocating importance of software freedom and development work on the Linux kernel 2002 Professor Lawrence Lessig - for promoting the understanding of the political dimension of free software, including the idea that code is law 2001 Guido von Rossum - for inventing and implementing as Free Software the Python programming language 2000 Brian Paul - for ground-breaking work on the Mesa 3D graphics library 1999 Miguel de Icaza - project leader of GNOME 1998 Larry Wall - for the many contributions to the advancement of freely distributed software, most notably Perl