Bradley M. Kuhn

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I Received a 2012 O'Reilly Open Source Award

Monday 23 July 2012 by Bradley M. Kuhn

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.

Posted on Monday 23 July 2012 at 12:40 by Bradley M. Kuhn.

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