2002-02-16-FSF-Award Free Software Foundation Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110, USA Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Brussels, Belgium Saturday, February 16, 2002 Free Software Foundation Bradley M. Kuhn pr@gnu.org +1-617-542-5942 http://www.fsf.org Free Software Foundation Europe Georg C. F. Greve greve@gnu.org +49-40-23809080 http://www.fsfeurope.org The Free Software Foundation (FSF) bestowed today its fourth annual FSF Award for the Advancement of Free Software. FSF President and founder, Richard Stallman, presented the award to Guido van Rossum for inventing and implementing as Free Software the Python programming language. The award ceremony was hosted at the Free and Open Source Software Developers' Meeting (FOSDEM) in collaboration with the Free Software Foundation Europe. 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. The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSF Europe) is a charitable non-governmental organization dedicated to all aspects of Free Software in Europe. Access to software determines who may participate in a digital society. Therefore the freedoms to use, copy, modify and redistribute software - as described in the Free Software definition - allow equal participation in the information age. Creating awareness for these issues, securing Free Software politically and legally, and giving people freedom by supporting development of Free Software are central issues of the FSF Europe, which was founded in 2001 as the European sister organization of the Free Software Foundation in the United States. More information about the FSF Europe can be found at http://www.fsfeurope.org/. The Free Software Foundation, founded in 1985, is dedicated to promoting computer users' right to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer programs. The FSF promotes the development and use of free (as in freedom) software---particularly the GNU operating system and its GNU/Linux variants---and free documentation for free software. The FSF also helps to spread awareness of the ethical and political issues of freedom in the use of software. Their web site, located at http://www.gnu.org, is an important source of information about GNU/Linux. They are headquartered in Boston, MA, USA. GNU/Linux is the integrated combination of the GNU operating system with the kernel, Linux, written by Linus Torvalds in 1991. The various versions of GNU/Linux have an estimated 20 million users. Some people call the GNU/Linux system "Linux", but this misnomer leads to confusion (people cannot tell whether you mean the whole system or the kernel, one part), and spreads an inaccurate picture of how, when and where the system was developed. Making a consistent distinction between GNU/Linux, the whole operating system, and Linux, the kernel, is the best way to clear up the confusion. See http://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html for more explanation.