Harald Welte and Groklaw win FSF's 2007 Free Software Awards

Harald Welte and Groklaw win FSF's 2007 Free Software Awards

By Pamela Jones
Groklaw

March 19 2008

We won the Free Software Foundation's 2007 award [ http://www.fsf.org/news/2007_free_software_awards ], the Award for Projects of Social Benefit. So this is recognition of us as a group. Harald Welte won the Award for the Advancement of Free Software. The press release says this about our work at Groklaw:

The Award for Projects of Social Benefit is presented annually to a free software project that intentionally and significantly benefits society. Since its start in 2003, Groklaw has evolved into an invaluable source of legal and technical information for software developers, lawyers, law professors, and historians.

We've worked so hard together for so long, it is wonderful to have our group work recognized. Dan Bricklin was kind enough to attend for us and convey our thank you, and there's a picture of him with the award in the press release. FSF's art designer designed our plaque so charmingly. You can see a picture of it in the press release, but Dan sent me a picture he took, too. Would you like to see it?

Here it is, your award:

Isn't that nice, how the artist, Lincoln Read, took the magnifying glass from our logo and designed the award? I love it. Since you couldn't be there, here's the audio [ http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/ThankyouFSFfinal.ogg ] [Ogg] of the thank you I sent, in addition to Dan's remarks. He brought his OLPC XO to play it on.

: )

And here's the awards committee, and when you read the names, I'm sure you'll feel as proud as I do:

This year's award committee was Peter H. Salus (Chair), Raj Mathur, Hong Feng, Lawrence Lessig, Andrew Tridgell, Jonas Oberg, Verner Vinge, Richard Stallman, Suresh Ramasubramanian, Alan Cox, and Fernanda G. Weiden.

All that transcribing at 3 AM... it was not wasted effort, and now you can say that your contributions were part of winning the award, because it's true.

Update: My favorite email of congratulations reads like this:

Tenacity counts. The FSF knows it. Congratulations.

08:34 PM EDT