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2001 Free Software Awards

Description of Award Ceremony

The 2001 Free Software Foundation Award Ceremony was held Free and Open Source Software Developers' Meeting (FOSDEM) in Brussels, Belgium on 16 February 2002. The ceremony was held in collaboration with the Free Software Foundation Europe.

FSF President and founder, Richard Stallman, presented the award to Guido van Rossum for inventing and implementing as Free Software the Python programming language.

A committee of Free Software pioneers and leaders selected the winner and two other finalists from the scores of mostly volunteer programmers worldwide who dedicate their time to advancing Free Software. The selection committee included: Miguel de Icaza, Ian Murdock, Eric Raymond, Peter Salus, Vernor Vinge, and Larry Wall. Prior to committee deliberations, a two month open nominations process decided the list from which the committee chose these finalists.

Guido van Rossum was chosen from three finalists for the award. The other finalists were L. Peter Deutsch, for his work on GNU Ghostscript, the popular Postscript emulation program for GNU/Linux, and Andrew Tridgell, for his work on Samba, a Microsoft Windows network file system emulation program.

This was the fourth award of this kind. The prior winners were Larry Wall, Miguel de Icaza, and Brian Paul.

A Full press release for the event is available in English and in French.

About FOSDEM

FOSDEM's goal is to provide Free Software and Open Source developers and communities the opportunity to learn and discuss the latest developments in the Free Software and Open Source arena and to promote the development and the benefits of Free Software and Open Source solutions.

Still Photos of the Ceremony

Olivier Berger took some still photos of the ceremony:

[FSF logo] “Our mission is to preserve, protect and promote the freedom to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer software, and to defend the rights of Free Software users.”

The Free Software Foundation is the principal organizational sponsor of the GNU Operating System. Support GNU and the FSF by buying manuals and gear, joining the FSF as an associate member, or making a donation, either directly to the FSF or via Flattr.

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