LibrePlanet 2023 Conference Announces Free Software Award Winners
The annual prize laureates of the Free Software Awards 2022 were announced at the LibrePlanet 2023 conference. The awards were established by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and are awarded to people who have made significant contributions to the development of free software and socially significant free projects. The winners were presented with memorable records and letters, with no monetary rewards.
Eli Zaretskii, one of the accompanying GNU Emacs developers who has been participating in the project’s development for more than 30 years, was awarded the Prize for the Promotion and Development of Free Software. Eli was also involved in the development of GNU Texinfo, GDB, GNU Make, and GNU Gryp.
The award for projects that brought significant benefits to society and contributed to the solution of important social problems went to the project GNU Jami (previously known as Ring and SFLPHONE). This project is developing a decentralized communication platform that allows for communication of large groups and the implementation of individual challenges with a high level of confidentiality and security. The platform maintains a direct connection between users (P2P) using encryption.
The award for outstanding contribution by a new participant to the development of free software, given to beginners whose first contribution demonstrates a noticeable commitment to the free software movement, went to TAD (Skewedzeppelin), the leader of the project DivestOS. This project is supporting the fork of the Lineage mobile platform cleaned of non-free components. TAD also participated in the development of completely free Android flash of Replicant.
Previous winners of the Free Software Awards include Paul Eggert, responsible for maintaining the database of time zones used in most UNIX-systems and in all Linux distributions, as well as Bradley M. Kuhn, Executive Director and one of the creators of the human rights organization Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), Jim Meyering, who has been supporting the GNU Coreutils package since 1991, and Deborah Nicholson, Director for Interaction with the Community in the organization of Software Freedom Conservancy, among others.
For more information and a full list of past winners, visit the