The winners of Free Software Foundation’s 2021 Software Awards for achievements in the field of free software, are SecuRepairs, Paul Eggert, and Protesilaos Stavrou.
SecuRepairs was the winner of the Award for Projects of Social Benefit, which is presented to a project or team responsible for applying free software, or the ideas of the free software movement to benefit society.
SecuRepairs helps to provide factual advice on information security issues like data privacy as they pertain to repairing devices and software, and works to help combat the anti-right-to-repair narrative spread by certain large hardware manufacturers.
“Right to repair is about declaring once and for all that we are the owners of our stuff: our phones, our laptops, our home appliances, television sets, automobiles, and farm equipment. We are not tenants of multinational corporations who want to sell us things and then dictate the conditions and terms under which we can use them,” said Paul Roberts, the founder of SecuRepairs.
The 2021 Award for Outstanding New Free Software Contributor went to Protesilaos “Prot” Stavrou for his contributions to the GNU Emacs community through his blog posts, livestreams, conference talks, and code contributions.
Lastly, the Award for the Advancement of Free Software was given to Paul Egert for his contributions to the GNU operating system for over thirty years, including contributions to components like GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), and his current maintenance of the Time Zone Database (tz), which provides accurate information on the world’s time zones.
Additional details about the awards and the recipients are available here.
