Let’s Encrypt Won the FSF’s Annual Award

Editorial Staff

March 14, Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced the recipients of the 2019 Free Software Awards. This year, a new category was introduced to recognize outstanding new free software contributor, and a Brazilian student was crowned the winner. And for the organization category, it was Let’s Encrypt who won the title.

The annual Free Software Awards are granted to organizations and individuals who have made significant contributions to the free software movement. The awards will be given at the LibrePlanet conference, held around March 30 every year. As LibrePlanet is to be held online this year, the Free Software Awards ceremony will follow suit.

The new division “Award for Outstanding New Free Software Contributor” was introduced this year to recognize significant commitments made by newly-joined free software contributor. This year’s winner is Clarissa Lima Borges, a Brazilian software engineering student. She worked on usability testing on GNOME applications while she was working as an intern via Outreachy (an internship mechanism for open source and free software fields).

The “Award for Projects of Social Benefit”, which is presented to team or organization, was granted to Let’s Encrypt. Let’s Encrypt is a non-profitable organization founded with the goal to promote web traffic encryption, and being the global Certificate Authority, it issues SSL certificates. According to FSF executive director John Sullivan, Let’s Encrypt “is a project that took on a problem that so many people and so many large, vested interests said they would never be able to solve. And they tackled that problem using free software and important principles of the free software movement.”

The “Award for the Advancement of Free Software”, which is given to an individual who contributed to the progress of free software, was awarded to Jim Meyering, free software programmer and maintainer. The award was presented to him by Richard Stallman, the founder of Free Software Foundation and GNU Project.

Free Software Foundataion（FSF）
https://www.fsf.org/