Andy Wingo, Alx Sa, Govdirectory — Free Software Foundation — Working together for free software

This year’s Free Software Awards recipients are Andy Wingo, Alx
Sa, and Govdirectory.

Andy Wingo is the winner of the Award for the Advancement of Free
Software, which is given to an individual who has made a great
contribution to the progress and development of free software through
activities in accordance with the spirit of software freedom.

Andy is one of the co-maintainers of GNU Guile, the official
extension language of the GNU operating system and the Scheme
“backbone” of GNU Guix. Upon receiving the award, he stated:
“Since I learned about free software, the vision of a world in which
hackers freely share and build on each others’ work has been a
profound inspiration to me, and I am humbled by this recognition of my
small efforts in the context of the Guile Scheme implementation. I
thank my co-maintainer, Ludovic Courtès, for his comradery over the
years: we are just building on the work of the past maintainers of
Guile, and I hope that we live long enough to congratulate its many
future maintainers.”

The 2024 Award for Outstanding New Free Software Contributor went
to Alx Sa for work on the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP).
When asked to comment, Alx responded: “I am honored to receive this
recognition! I started contributing to the GNU Image Manipulation
Program as a way to return the favor because of all the cool things
it’s allowed me to do. Thanks to the help and mentorship of amazing
people like Jehan Pagès, Jacob Boerema, Liam Quin, and so many others,
I hope I’ve been able to help other people do some cool new things,
too.”

Govdirectory was presented with this year’s Award for Projects
of Social Benefit, given to a project or team responsible for
applying free software, or the ideas of the free software movement, to
intentionally and significantly benefit society. Govdirectory provides
a collaborative and fact-checked listing of government addresses,
phone numbers, websites, and social media accounts, all of which can
be viewed with free software and under a free license, allowing people
to always reach their representatives in freedom.

When asked to comment on their receipt of the award, Govdirectory
co-founders Jan Ainali and Albin Larsson stated: “We are honored by
this recognition and are deeply humbled to be among previous winners,
some of whom we depend on, especially since we feel like a young
project with many more important features to add and coverage to
increase before we cover all of the world. For us in Govdirectory,
even though the platform itself is not primarily intended for reuse,
the four freedoms are part of our ethos as we see ourselves as a small
corner of the community. In times like these with a lot of mis- and
disinformation, our credibility is dependent on being able to build
trust, and on anyone having the freedom to inspect how the platform is
built and where the data is coming from.”

The FSF plans to further highlight the Free Software Award winners in
a series of events scheduled for the new year to celebrate their
contributions to free software. More information will be coming soon.

About the Free Software Foundation

The Free Software Foundation, founded in 1985, is dedicated to
promoting computer users’ right to use, study, copy, modify, and
redistribute computer programs. The FSF promotes the development and
use of free (as in freedom) software — particularly the GNU operating
system and its GNU/Linux variants — and free documentation for free
software. The FSF also helps to spread awareness of the ethical and
political issues of freedom in the use of software, and its websites,
located at and , are an important source of information
about GNU/Linux. Donations to support the FSF’s work can be made at
https://donate.fsf.org. The FSF is a remote organization,
incorporated in Massachusetts, US.

More information about the FSF, as well as important information for
journalists and publishers, is at https://www.fsf.org/press.

Media Contacts

Greg Farough
Campaigns Manager
Free Software Foundation

+1 (617) 542 5942
campaigns@fsf.org