Free Software Award Nominees, 1999

This page has been borrowed from Daniel Martin's page. He has kindly agreed to use this information on our website.

The GNU Project gives out this award every year for outstanding contributions to free software. This year's list of nominees is available from the GNU Project's website.

This page tries to list some of this years nominees and their achievements in sorted order of their names.

Alan Cox
Linux kernel hacker extraordinaire; creater and maintainer of Portaloo, a portal cgi engine.
Alessandro Rubini
Wrote Linux Device Drivers, notable linux driver book.
Alexandre Julliard
Maintainer of Wine.
Alfredo Kenji Kojima
Author of the window manager WindowMaker.
Andi Gutmans
PHP Core team member and Zend author
Andrew Tridgell
Famous Samba developer, employed by SGI; head of the Samba project.
Apache Software Foundation
The people behind several pieces of free software, most notably the Apache web server.
Armed [GNU/]Linux
A GNU/Linux distribution aimed at being installable from inside Windows 9x.
Bernhard Rosenkraenzer
Aka “bero”, the guy behind berolinux and beroftp.
Bert Tyler
Original creator of fractint.
Bill Gates
I have to believe someone was trying to be funny. Chairman and CEO of the oft-villified Microsoft Corporation.
Bill Joy
CTO for Sun; invented vi, Jini, and many other things.
Bram Moolenaar
The lead developer of vim, a text editor in the spirit of vi.
Brian Behlendorf
Head of the Apache project.
Brian Paul
Developer of Mesa, the OpenGL clone.
Caolán McNamara
Author of wvWare (formerly MSWordView); general WindowsMetaFile-related hacking.
Carsten Haitzler
Aka “Rasterman” — one of the two people behind the Enlightenment window manager. (and Imlib, Eeyes, etc.)
Charles Hannum
NetBSD core developer.
Chuck Hagenbuch
Author of IMP, an IMAP<->Web system based on PHP.
Craig Burley
Long time g77 project leader.
Dan Ingalls
One of the founders of Smalltalk (with Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg).
Danny ter Haar
CEO of Cistron and author of init. Active in the Dutch Domain Registry and a lobbyist.
Darryl Strauss
Maintainer of glide for GNU/Linux. Works at Precision Insight doing accelerated 3D for XFree.
Dave Rand
One of the people behind the Multi Router Traffic Grapher.
Debian Project
People who put together Debian, a GNU/Linux distribution.
DJ Delorie
The only reason there exists any GNU software for DOS. Ok, that may be a slight exaggeration, but this is the person behind DJGPP, the GNU compiler port to DOS.
Donald Becker
GNU/Linux kernel hacker; wrote lots of network card drivers; major figure in the Beowulf project at NASA.
Donald Knuth
Author of TeX, (and associated tools) the typesetting software. Author of one of the all-time classic computer science textbooks. He also created a sadly-underutilized system for literate programming called “Web”.
Doug McEachern
Lead author and maintainer of Apache's mod_perl, offerring superior perl integration with the Apache web server.
Dr Douglas Schmidt
Lead developer of ACE; long time contributor of open source code, including GPERF and a high performance CORBA 2.2 compliant ORB. Frequently gives patient answers to questions on the ACE, TAO, and CORBA users' newsgroups.
Earl Hood
Author of several perl and perl-based tools, among them MHonArc, a mail to html converter. Also maintains the perlWWW and perlSGML indices.
Eric Allman
The original author of sendmail. While working at the University of California, he got involved with the early Unix effort at Berkeley. Over the years, he wrote a number of utilities that appeared with various releases of BSD, including the -me macros, tset, trek, syslog, vacation, and of course sendmail.
Fractint Team
The people behind fractint, a wonderful fractal-visualization tool for DOS. Fractint was developed collaboratively over compuserve and internet email long before “open source” was even two words next to each other. This group is also responsible for the “Stone Soup” characterization of “open source”.
Fred Fish
Early (1980s) distributor of free and public domain software, mostly for the Amiga. The “Fish Disks” were a great number of people's introduction to the world of free software and prompted many of them to go on to contribute themselves. Also ported GNU software to the Amiga and BeOS.
FreeBSD Team
The folks behind FreeBSD.
Geoff Harrison
Aka “Mandrake”, one of the two people behind the Enlightenment window manager.
Guido van Rossum
Created the Python programming language. (Larry Wall says the Dr. Dobbs prize Mr. van Rossum won this past year doesn't affect the FSF's award)
James Clark
His developments include groff, sgmls, SP, Jade, XT and XP. He has been heavily involved with standards bodies (ISO SC34 and W3C), and was the technical lead for the development of XML. His software is noted for its attention to internationalization issues.
Jamie Zawinski
Developer of Lucid Emacs (xemacs), former lead programmer of Mozilla, originator of the “no magic pixie-dust” characterization of “open source”.
He also wrote xscreensaver and several other X programs.
Jeffrey A. Law
One of the top people of egcs development.
Jeremy Katz
Involved heavily in icecast and was one of the founders of linuxpower.org.
Jim Blandy
Maintainer of guile, the FSF's preferred extension language and all-around good programming glue. Has worked for the Free Software Foundation on and off for nine years.
Jim Winstead
PHP Core team member.
Joey Hess
Major contributor to Debian. Maintainer of the program “Alien” which allows one, as much as is possible, to use binary packages from one GNU/Linux distribution on other distributions.
John Gilmore
Co-founder of Cygnus, reintegrator of gdb, open source and cryptography activist.
John Ousterhout
Created the Tcl programming language.
Jordan K. Hubbard
One of the core FreeBSD team members. Whenever you see cathair.freebsd.org:/USR/SRC/SYS/COMPILE in your dmesg, that's him.
Jorrit Tyberghein
The person behind Crystal Space, a portable 3D engine.
Keith Sklower
Wrote RFCs 1717 and 1969, which define the PPP Multilink Protocol and PPP DES Protocol. (But there must be more — what does this have to do with free software?)
Kirk McKusick
Major figure in BSD development. He contributed an account of the early history of BSD the O'Reilly's “Open Sources” book.
Kyle Jones
Author of VM, the Emacs mail reader.
Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen
Author of Gnus, the Emacs news/mail reader.
Lennart Augustsson
Created USB tools for NetBSD, the largest and most comprehensive set of USB tools.
Marc Lehmann
Maintainer of pgcc; also has a few GIMP plugins to his name.
Mark Linton
Lead developer of dbx, InterViews, and Fresco.
Matthias Ettrich
Lead developer of Lyx, then KDE on top of Qt.
Miguel de Icaza
One of the driving forces behind GNOME; also the main author of Midnight Commander, a very popular non-GUI (i.e. console) file manager. He was also heavily involved in one of the Linux kernel ports, and is heavily involved in developing Gnumeric (the GNOME spreadsheet) and Bonobo (the GNOME embedding architecture).
Mike Heins
Creator of Minivend, free software-based e-commerce. Also responsible for the CGI::Imagemap perl module.
Mike Karels
Major figure in early BSD development.
Miquel van Smoorenburg
Wrote several utilities, as well as Cistron's Radius software. (Cistron's past ftp site contained much of his stuff.)
MRTG Team
The people behind MRTG, a tool to visualize network traffic.
Nicholas Petreley
Journalist; colunmist for linuxworld and infoworld, the editor of NC World before it went broke.
Olivetti Research Laboratories
The creators of VNC (Virtual Network Computing, a remote display system) and omniORB (a small and fast CORBA implementation). Note that since the start of 1999 they haven't existed as “Olivetti Research Laboratories” but as “AT&T Labs Cambridge”.
Olivier Fourdan
Author of Xfce, a lightweight and easily configurable environment for X11.
Patrick Lenz
Aka “Scoop”, the person behind freshmeat.
Patrick Volkerding
Slackware distribution maintainer.
Paul Eggert
Linux kernel hacker currently lecturing at UCLA.
Paul Mackerras
One of the co-writers of rsync. One of the people involved with the AP/Linux project.
Paul Vixie
Author of “Vixie cron”, the standard cron against which all others are measured. Also the primary author of bind. Anti-spam activist.
Peter Mattis
One of the two creators of the GIMP and its widget set GTK+.
Phil Zimmerman
The man behind PGP; cryptography activist.
PHP Project
All of the people behind PHP, a language for server-side web scripting/web-database interaction.
Ralf S. Engelschall
Author of WML, ePerl, iSelect, MM, NPS, shtool and Pth. Core Apache team member, including contributing mod_ssl, mod_rewrite and APACI.
Rasmus Lerdorf
Created the PHP language and also an Apache core team member.
SGI
Silicon Graphics Inc. In addition to their more conventional software and hardware activities, they do development work on the linux kernel, have released their XFS journaling filesystem under the GPL and have freed GLX.
Shane Caraveo
Core PHP developer. (And I suspect more; any help on this?)
Shawn Hargreaves
Main author of the Allegro graphics/sound/input/etc library for DJGPP.
Spencer Kimball
One of the two creators of the GIMP and its widget set GTK+.
Stig Bakken
PHP Core team member.
Theo De Raadt
Created OpenBSD, making the most proactively secure OS around.
Thomas Bushnell
Designer and current maintainer of GNU Hurd. Previously maintained GNU tar.
Tim Berners-Lee
Created the WWW by authoring the HTML, URL and HTTP standards, as well as the first web server and browsers. Since then a tireless advocate of open content, very active in the W3C.
Tim O'Reilly
CEO of O'Reilly & Associates, publishers of documentation for various computer systems. Also, publisher of much of the existing documentation for free software systems.
Tim Wegner
Graphics guru; one of the developers in the Fractint group and also one of the people behind POV-Ray. Creator of the PNG format.
Tobias Oetiker
One of the people behind the Multi Router Traffic Grapher. Also the author of several other tools.
Tom Adelstein
The CIO/CFO of Bynari, Inc. He's the author of several books and articles on business and technology and has management, consulting and hands-on experience in the Information Technology field.
Werner Koch
The main person behind GnuPG.
Wietse Venema
Author of several security packages, most notably TCP Wrappers; co-author of the network scanning tool SATAN. Author of Postfix, the latest free-software mailer that everyone's talking about.
W. Richard Stevens
(Deceased) author of books on network programming, best written works on internet protocols for those not interested in sifting through RFC's.
Zeev Suraski
PHP Core team member and Zend author.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Daniel Martin for doing such a fine job in compiling this list.

Thanks to:

Disclaimer

This information is taken from Daniel Martin's website. The FSF makes no claims of correctness for the information, and does not endorse the sites and organizations whose web pages are linked to.