The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has announced the winners of the annual Free Software Awards 2024. These awards are given to individuals who have made significant contributions to the development of free software and socially relevant free projects. The winners receive commemorative certificates, as the award does not come with a monetary prize.
Andy Wingo, one of the maintainers of the GNU Guile project, received the award for his promotion and development of free software. The GNU Guile project focuses on developing a free implementation of the functional programming language Scheme, which is used in various projects such as the GNU Guix package manager and the GDB debugger.
The award for projects that have made significant societal contributions and addressed important social issues was given to Govdirectory. This project maintains a directory of contact information, social networks, and services that allow citizens to engage with government agencies in various countries, including Latvia, Russia, and Ukraine.
The award for outstanding contribution by a new participant in the free software development community was presented to Alx Sa. Alx Sa was recognized for his active involvement in the development of the free graphics editor GIMP, where he rose to the 4th position in the number of GIMP commits within three years of joining the project.
Previous winners of the Free Software Awards include Bruno Haible in 2023, Eli Zaretskii in 2022, Paul Eggert in 2021, Bradley Kuhn in 2020, Jim Meiring in