Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2012/07/23/award.html
On last Friday 20 July
2012, I
received
an O’Reilly
Open Source Award, in appreciation for my decade of work in Free
Software non-profit organizations, including my current daily work at
the Software Freedom Conservancy, my work at the
FSF (including
starting FSF’s associate membership program), and for my work creating
and defending copyleft licensing, including such things as inventing the
idea behind
the Affero
clause, helping
draft AGPLv3,
and, more generally, enforcing copyleft.
I’m very proud of all this work. My obsession with software freedom
goes back far into my past, when I downloaded my first copy
of GNU Emacs in 1991
from Usenet and my first GNU/Linux
distribution, SLS,
in 1992, booting for the first time, on the first computer I ever
owned, a copy of Linux 0.99pl12.
I honestly have written a lot less Free Software than I wanted to.
I’ve made a patch here and there over the years to dozens of projects.
I was a co-maintainer of the AGPL’d
PokerSource system for a while, and I made various (mostly
mixed-success) attempts to build a
better virtual machine for Perl, which now is done much
better than I ever
did by the Parrot project.
Despite the fact that making better software was what enthralled me
most, feeling the helplessness of supporting, using and writing
proprietary software in my brief for-profit career convinced me that lack
of adequate software freedom was the most dangerous social justice problem
in the computing community. I furthermore realized that lots of people
were ready and willing to write great Free Software, but that few wanted
to do the (frankly more boring) work of running non-profit organizations
to defend and advance software freedom. Thus, I devoted myself to helping
FSF and Conservancy to be successful organizations that could assist in
that regard. I’m privileged and proud to continue my service to both of
these organizations.
Being recognized for this work means a great deal to me. Awards have a
special meaning for me, because financial success never really mattered
much to me, but knowing that I’ve made a contribution to something
greater than myself matters greatly. Receiving an award that indicates
that I’ve succeeded in that regard invigorates me to do even more. So,
at this moment of receiving this award, I’d like to thank all of you in
the software freedom community who appreciate
and support my work. It
means a great deal to me that my work has made a positive impact.
