2012 Free Software Award Winners Announced 43
jrepin writes "Free Software Foundation president Richard M. Stallman announced the winners of the FSF's annual Free Software Awards at a ceremony held during the LibrePlanet 2013 conference. The Award for the Advancement of Free Software is given annually to an individual who has made a great contribution to the progress and development of free software, through activities that accord with the spirit of free software. This year, it was given to Dr. Fernando Perez, the creator of IPython, a rich architecture for interactive computing. The Award for Projects of Social Benefit is presented to the project or team responsible for applying free software, or the ideas of the free software movement, in a project that intentionally and significantly benefits society in other aspects of life. This award stresses the use of free software in the service of humanity. This year, the award went to OpenMRS, a free software medical record system for developing countries."
I admire these people (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Conditions? (Score:2, Insightful)
That's a silly thing to say considering it's the developer himself who is free to determine the license he wishes to release his work under. A lot of developers want to release their work under the GPL, and a lot don't. But all are free to license their work as they see fit.
Re:Conditions? (Score:5, Insightful)
GPL doesnt "make the software really free" unless you subscribe to a particular definition of freedom which excludes developer freedom.
Much like liberty doesn't make people really free unless you subscribe to a particular definition of freedom which excludes jailor freedom.
Any definition of freedom that doesn't let me put other people into cages just isn't really freedom.
Re:So I guess (Score:1, Insightful)
That's not free software according to the FSF because it is BSD licensed rather than GPL. Also it was 'written solely to undermine freedom'. [ycombinator.com]
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20100806143457345 [groklaw.net]
36:50
What we are entering in upon then is our maturity. It isn't that GNU is finished. GNU, fortunately, is renewed all the time and is becoming renewable. In the same way that there was a moment a few years back when I talked to Leon, and I realized that there were a bunch of young hackers in their late teens who were getting into apps and that's going to have an enormous effect in renewing what was there. We are gonna have a flood of people towards GNU, and that's going to make an immense difference.
It's going to happen everywhere. But Mr. Jobs is investing heavily in LLVM solely so he can stop using GCC, lest the patents somehow leak across the GPLv3 barrier, and we become able to use his claims. Nobody has ever tried before, to build a multi-platform C compiler solely in order to undermine freedom. [laughter] A hardware manufacturer or two has done something here and there -- we had a little bit of BSD interest in non-copyleft compilation -- but here's the man whose selfishness surpasses any recorded selfishness. [laughter/applause]
38:26
It's unfortunate. But writing software is what we do best. And catching GCC with LLVM isn't going to be easy. [?] you know, there's lots to do.
Basically the FSF's objection to LLVM is that it duplicates functionality in GCC and that they don't control it so they can't put it under GPVv6 when an angel reads that out to Stallman in a toejam inspired hallucination.
The strange thing is that bad mouthing competing projects because you don't control them is the sort of thing Jobs or Ballmer would do.
Re:So I guess (Score:4, Insightful)
That's not free software according to the FSF because it is BSD licensed rather than GPL.
That's not true. The BSD license is definitely present in the FSF's list of free software licenses [gnu.org].
ipython (Score:4, Insightful)
The Ipython notebook, although not an original idea (I think they were inspired by the Sage notebook), is just fantastic. I do a fair amount of exploratory analysis and it's so much better doing it in a notebook than in a standalone script - I get to see all the plots, and document as I go along. Most importantly, it lets me experiment with commands as one would in a regular interpreter shell, but without the clutter of all my faulty commands.
If anyone wants to help open source, I would strongly recommend helping improve ipython, scipy or matplotlib. Fernando Perez pointed out in a recent conference that while on the surface these all seem like excellent, well polished projects, if one looks at the committers, they'll find most commits are being done by 2-3 people (for each project). It's not healthy for it to depend on so few people. As a case in point, the main committer for matlplotlib passed away recently and everyone's nervous about its future.