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2000 Free Software Awards

Description of Award Ceremony

The 2000 Free Software Foundation Award Ceremony was held at the Museum of Jewish Art and History in Paris, France on the evening of 1 February 2001. The ceremony was sponsored by Aurora, Idealx, and VA Linux Systems. The Association for Promotion and Research in Libre Computing (APRIL), the French associate organization of the Free Software Foundation Europe, organized the ceremony. Proceeds from the event went to benefit the Free Software Foundation Europe.

Richard Stallman presented the award, a one-of-a-kind handmade quilt, to Brian Paul for his ground-breaking work on the Mesa 3D Graphics Library.

Brian Paul was chosen from three finalists for the award. The other finalists were Donald Becker, for his network device drivers for the GNU/Linux system and Patrick Lenz for his work on freshmeat.net.

At the ceremony, additional awards were also distributed. Georg C. F. Greve, president designate of the FSF Europe, presented Daniel Riek with a certificate of appreciation for his seminal funding of the Free Software Foundation Europe. Frederic Couchet, president of APRIL, presented Loic Dachary with an award commemorating his unwavering support and contributions to free software over the past 14 years.

A Full press release for the event, in English, German and French, is available. English-only, French-only, and German-only versions are also available.

Movie of the Ceremony

An MPEG-2 movie of the event is available at http://audio-video.gnu.org/. Beware: it is a very big file (1.1 GB).

The movie was captured and encoded using free software. Since it's not yet mature, no streamed view is available, the stream is somewhat buggy and you must expect to experience software bugs when reading it. Hopefully this will encourage developers to build better free software to capture and display MPEG-2. Christophe Massiot wrote a complete description of the capture process. The movie can be viewed with the VideoLAN Client, version 0.2.5 or later, a solution developed for MPEG-2 streaming on a LAN.

It's worth mentioning that VideoLAN was officially released under the GPL by Ecole Centrale de Paris for the occasion, after active lobbying from the IDEALX team and all the VideoLAN project members involved in the operation.

Text Transcript of the Ceremony

A text transcript of the event is available.

Still Photos of the Ceremony

Olivier Berger took some still photos of the ceremony:

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