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2003 Free Software Awards

The 2003 Free Software Foundation Award Ceremony was held Free and Open Source Software Developers' Meeting (FOSDEM) in Brussels, Belgium on Saturday 21 February 2004.

FSF President and founder, Richard Stallman, presented the award to Alan Cox for his work advocating the importance of software freedom, his outspoken opposition to the USA's DMCA (and other technology control measures) and his development work on the kernel named Linux (commonly used as part of the GNU/Linux operating system). Mr. Cox was unable to attend the event, so Dan Veillard accepted the award on his behalf.

A committee of Free Software leaders selected the winner and two other finalists from the nominations received by the public among the thousands of mostly volunteer programmers worldwide who dedicate their time to advancing Free Software. The selection committee included: Enrique A. Chaparro, Frederic Couchet, Miguel de Icaza, Raju Mathur, Frederick Noronha, Jonas Oberg, Bruce Perens, Peter Salus, Suresh Ramasubramanian, Richard Stallman, and Vernor Vinge.

Prior to committee deliberations, a four month open nominations process decided the list from which the committee chose these finalists.

Alan Cox was chosen from three finalists for the award. The other finalists were Theo de Raadt (known for his work on OpenBSD) and Werner Koch (known for his work on GnuPG).

The Call for Nominations is also available.

Still Photos of the Ceremony

Tim Verhoeven took three photos (1, 2, 3) of Mr. Veillard (left) and Mr. Stallman (right) with the award.

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