[ Thanks to Bradley M.
Kuhn for this link. ]
Brussels, Belgium – Saturday, February 16, 2002
– 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.