I'm not sure Rubén Rodríguez, Francis Rowe, or Richard Stallman are really
good candidates for various reasons. RMS is obviously ineligible (or it was
to some here anyway). There are a number of other people who deserve
recognition for the work they've done including Rubén Rodríguez and Francis
Rowe, but I'm skeptical that this award is appropriate for these people. The
award has traditionally been given to people who have primarily working on
software development. While there is some of that going on within these
projects I'm not convinced I'd call it the primary focus. Packaging, removing
code, reverse engineering, and similar efforts are worthy of an award, but
that's not really primarily software development.
I think we need a more general award to recognize a slew of people who are
making major contributions, but of whom are not directly working on software
development projects. This could include people who are managing
distributions (ie building, maintaining, and packaging software, and writing
bits of code here and there), spreading free software (in significant ways),
advocating for release of code from within (think hardware too), designing
chips/laptops/desktops/board that make it possible to run 100% software, and
similar.
I can think of a dozen people I'd like to nominate and yet I have never
nominated anyone as I haven't felt the awards were appropriate to the work
they're/were doing. It's my main reason for abstaining. I don't feel that
releasing code under a free software license in and of itself is deserving of
a free software award. It's important, but it's not everything.
