2002 Free Software Awards

The 2002 Free Software Foundation Award Ceremony was held Free and Open Source Software Developers' Meeting (FOSDEM) in Brussels, Belgium on Saturday 8 February 2003. The ceremony was held in collaboration with the Free Software Foundation Europe.

FSF President and founder, Richard Stallman, presented the award to Lawrence Lessig for promoting understanding of the political dimension of free software, including the idea that “code is law”. Lessig has also promoted ideas similar to free software in other related fields.

A committee of Free Software leaders selected the winner and two other finalists from the nominations received by the public among the thousands of mostly volunteer programmers worldwide who dedicate their time to advancing Free Software. The selection committee included: Enrique A. Chaparro, Frederic Couchet, Hong Feng, Miguel de Icaza, Raju Mathur, Frederick Noronha, Jonas Oberg, Eric Raymond, Guido van Rossum, Peter Salus, Suresh Ramasubramanian, and Larry Wall.

Prior to committee deliberations, a four month open nominations process decided the list from which the committee chose these finalists.

Lessig was chosen from three finalists for the award. The other finalists were Bruno Haible (known for his work on GNU CLISP) and Theo de Raadt (known for his work on OpenBSD).

A full press release for the event is available.

Still Photos of the Ceremony

We hope that someone took some photos and will send them to us!