The O'Reilly Open Source Award is presented to individuals for dedication, innovation, leadership and outstanding contribution to

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

. From 2005 to 2009 the award was known as the

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

– O'Reilly Open Source Award but since 2010 the awards have only carried the O'Reilly name.

Award winners

This is a list of the winners of individuals that won the annual O'Reilly Open Source Awards.

2005

* Best Communicator:

Doc Searls David "Doc" Searls (born July 29, 1947), is an American journalist, columnist, and a widely read blogger. He is the host of FLOSS Weekly, a free and open-source software (FLOSS) themed netcast from the TWiT Network, a co-author of ''The Cluetra ...

(co-author of "

The Cluetrain Manifesto ''The Cluetrain Manifesto'' is a work of business literature collaboratively authored by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger. It was first posted to the web in 1999 as a set of ninety-five theses, and was published as ...

" and Senior Editor for

Linux Journal ''Linux Journal'' (''LJ'') is an American monthly technology magazine originally published by Specialized System Consultants, Inc. (SSC) in Seattle, Washington since 1994. In December 2006 the publisher changed to Belltown Media, Inc. in Houston ...

) * Best Evangelist:

Jeff Waugh Jeff Waugh (also known as "jdub") is an Australian free software and open source software engineer. He is known for his past prominence in the GNOME and Ubuntu projects and communities. Career In 2004, Waugh was hired by Mark Shuttleworth as ...

( Ubuntu Linux and

Gnome desktop A gnome is a mythological creature and diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy, first introduced by Paracelsus in the 16th century and later adopted by more recent authors including those of modern fantasy literature. Its character ...

environment) * Best Diplomat: Geir Magnusson Jr * Best Integrator:

D. Richard Hipp Dwayne Richard Hipp (born April 9, 1961) is an American software developer and the primary author of SQLite as well as the Fossil (software), Fossil SCM. He also authored the Lemon (parser generator), Lemon parser generator, and CVSTrac; the latt ...

(

SQLite SQLite (, ) is a database engine written in the C programming language. It is not a standalone app; rather, it is a library that software developers embed in their apps. As such, it belongs to the family of embedded databases. It is the most ...

) * Best Hacker:

David Heinemeier Hansson David Heinemeier Hansson is a Denmark, Danish programmer, and the creator of the popular Ruby on Rails web development Software framework, framework and the Instiki, Instiki wiki. He is also a partner at the web-based software development firm B ...

(

Ruby on Rails Ruby on Rails (simplified as Rails) is a server-side web application framework written in Ruby under the MIT License. Rails is a model–view–controller (MVC) framework, providing default structures for a database, a web service, and web p ...

and

37Signals 37signals (formerly Basecamp before reverting to its original name) is an American web software company based in Chicago, Illinois. The firm was cofounded in 1999 by Jason Fried, Carlos Segura, and Ernest Kim as a web design company. Since mid ...

)

2006

* Best Legal Eagle:

Cliff Schmidt In geography and geology, a cliff is an area of rock which has a general angle defined by the vertical, or nearly vertical. Cliffs are formed by the processes of weathering and erosion, with the effect of gravity. Cliffs are common on coa ...

( Apache License) * Best Community Activist: Gervase Markham (programmer) ( Firefox) * Best Toolmaker:

Julian Seward Julian Seward is a British compiler writer and Free Software contributor who lives in Stuttgart. He is commonly known for creating the bzip2 compression tool in 1996, as well as the valgrind memory debugging toolset founded in 2000. In 2006, ...

( Valgrind) * Best Corporate Liaison:

Stefan Taxhet Stefan may refer to: * Stefan (given name) * Stefan (surname) * Ștefan, a Romanian given name and a surname * Štefan, a Slavic given name and surname * Stefan (footballer) (born 1988), Brazilian footballer * Stefan Heym, pseudonym of German writ ...

( OpenOffice.org) * Best All-around Developer:

Peter Lundblad Gustaf Peter Lundblad (26 August 1950 – 22 December 2015) was a Swedish singer and songwriter, well known for his 1986 song '' Ta mig till havet''. Lundblad started his career in the band 'The most Remarkable Nailband' where Lasse Tennander app ...

(

Subversion Subversion () refers to a process by which the values and principles of a system in place are contradicted or reversed in an attempt to transform the established social order and its structures of power, authority, hierarchy, and social norms. Sub ...

)

2007

* Best Community Builder:

Karl Fogel The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is the steward of the Open Source Definition, the set of rules that define open source software. It is a California public-benefit nonprofit corporation,_with_501(c)(3).html" ;"title="110. - 6910./ref> is a type o ...

* Best FUD Fighter:

Pamela Jones Pamela Jones, commonly known as PJ, is the creator and was editor of Groklaw, a website that covered legal news of interest to the free and open-source software community. Jones is an Open Source advocate who previously trained and worked as a ...

* Best Accessibility Architect:

Aaron Leventhal Aaron Leventhal is a retired American soccer player who played professionally in the USL A-League. Leventhal attended Drake University, playing on the men’s soccer team from 1992 to 1995. He is within the top ten of all Drake offensive record ...

* Best Strategist:

David Recordon David Recordon (born September 4, 1986) is an American technologist with an open standards and open source background. He is currently the Chief Technology Officer at Rebellion Defense. From January 2021 to September 2022, he served as the Di ...

* Best Outstanding Lifetime Contributions:

Paul Vixie Paul Vixie is an American computer scientist whose technical contributions include Domain Name System (DNS) protocol design and procedure, mechanisms to achieve operational robustness of DNS implementations, and significant contributions to open s ...

2008

* Best Community Amplifier: Chris Messina - BarCamp, Microformats and Spread Firefox * Best Contributor:

Angela Byron __NOTOC__ Angela Byron (born 1977) is a software developer best known for her work with Drupal, a free and open source content management system and content management framework. She has been named one of the most highly regarded contributors to t ...

Drupal Drupal () is a free and open-source web content management system (CMS) written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. Drupal provides an open-source back-end framework for at least 14% of the top 10,000 websites worldwide ...

* Best Education Enabler:

Martin Dougiamas Moodle is a free and open-source learning management system written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. Moodle is used for blended learning, distance education, flipped classroom and other online learning projects in sc ...

Moodle Moodle is a free and open-source learning management system written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. Moodle is used for blended learning, distance education, flipped classroom and other online learning projects in sch ...

* Best Interoperator: Andrew Tridgell -

Samba Samba (), also known as samba urbano carioca (''urban Carioca samba'') or simply samba carioca (''Carioca samba''), is a Brazilian music genre that originated in the Afro-Brazilian communities of Rio de Janeiro in the early 20th century. Havin ...

and Rsync * Defender of Rights: Harald Welte - gpl-violations.org

2009

* Best Open Source Database Hacker: Brian Aker - Drizzle and

MySQL MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database o ...

* Database Jedi Master:

Bruce Momjian PostgreSQL (, ), also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance. It was originally named POSTGRES, referring to its origins as a successor to the Ingr ...

PostgreSQL PostgreSQL (, ), also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance. It was originally named POSTGRES, referring to its origins as a successor to the In ...

* Best Community Builder: Clay Johnson -

Sunlight Labs The Sunlight Foundation was an American 501(c)(3) nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that advocated for open government. The organization was founded in April 2006 with the goal of increasing transparency and accountability in the United States ...

* Best Social Networking Hacker: Evan Prodromou - identi.ca and Laconica * Best Education Hacker:

Penny Leach A penny is a coin ( pennies) or a unit of currency (pl. pence) in various countries. Borrowed from the Carolingian denarius (hence its former abbreviation d.), it is usually the smallest denomination within a currency system. Presently, it is th ...

- Mahara and

2010

Jeremy Allison Jeremy Allison is a computer programmer known for his contributions to the free software community, notably to Samba, a re-implementation of SMB/CIFS networking protocol, released under the GNU General Public License. Other contributions in ...

Deborah Bryant Deborah Irene Bryant (born January 29, 1946) is an American beauty pageant titleholder from Overland Park, Kansas who was Miss Kansas 1965 and Miss America 1966. High school Deborah Bryant attended General H. H. Arnold High School in Wiesbade ...

* Brad Fitzpatrick -

memcached Memcached (pronounced variously ''mem-cash-dee'' or ''mem-cashed'') is a general-purpose distributed memory-caching system. It is often used to speed up dynamic database-driven websites by caching data and objects in RAM to reduce the number of t ...

, Gearman, MogileFS, and OpenID *

Leslie Hawthorn Leslie may refer to: * Leslie (name), a name and list of people with the given name or surname, including fictional characters Families * Clan Leslie, a Scottish clan with the motto "grip fast" * Leslie (Russian nobility), a Russian noble family ...

Summer of Code The Google Summer of Code, often abbreviated to GSoC, is an international annual program in which Google awards stipends to contributors who successfully complete a free and open-source software coding project during the summer. , the program is ...

Greg Stein Greg Stein (born March 16, 1967 in Portland, Oregon), living in Austin, Texas, United States, is a programmer, speaker, sometime standards architect, and open-source software advocate, appearing frequently at conferences and in interviews on the ...

Apache The Apache () are a group of culturally related Native American tribes in the Southwestern United States, which include the Chiricahua, Jicarilla, Lipan, Mescalero, Mimbreño, Ndendahe (Bedonkohe or Mogollon and Nednhi or Carrizaleño an ...

Python Python may refer to: Snakes * Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia ** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia * Python (mythology), a mythical serpent Computing * Python (pro ...

2011

Fabrice Bellard Fabrice Bellard (; born 1972) is a French computer programmer known for writing FFmpeg, QEMU, and the Tiny C Compiler. He developed Bellard's formula for calculating single digits of pi. In 2012, Bellard co-founded Amarisoft, a telecommunication ...

- QEMU, FFmpeg * Karen Sandler - SFLC, licensing *

Keith Packard Keith Packard (born April 16, 1963) is a software developer, best known for his work on the X Window System. Packard is responsible for many X extensions and technical papers on X. He has been heavily involved in the development of X since the l ...

X Window System The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting wit ...

Ryan Dahl Ryan Dahl (born 1981) is an American software engineer who is best known for creating the Node.js JavaScript runtime as well as the Deno JavaScript/TypeScript runtime. Biography Dahl grew up in San Diego, California. His mother bought him an ...

Node.js Node.js is an open-source server environment. Node.js is cross-platform and runs on Windows, Linux, Unix, and macOS. Node.js is a back-end JavaScript runtime environment. Node.js runs on the V8 JavaScript Engine and executes JavaScript code ou ...

Kohsuke Kawaguchi is a computer programmer who is best known as the creator of the Jenkins software project. While working at Sun Microsystems, he was the primary developer of Hudson project. He is also the recipient of the 2011 Google-O'Reilly Open Source A ...

Jenkins Jenkins may refer to: People * Jenkins (name), history of the surname * List of people with surname Jenkins * The Jenkins, country music group Places United States *Jenkins, Illinois *Jenkins, Kentucky *Jenkins, Minnesota *Jenkins, Missouri *Je ...

2012

* Massimo Banzi *

Jim Jagielski Jim Jagielski (born March 11, 1961) is an American software engineer, who specializes in web, cloud and open source technologies. Biography Jagielski graduated from the Johns Hopkins University in 1983 with a BES in Electrical/Computer Engine ...

* Christie Koehler *

Bradley M. Kuhn Bradley M. Kuhn (born 1973) is a free software activist from the United States. Kuhn is currently Policy Fellow and Hacker-in-Residence of the Software Freedom Conservancy, having previously been executive director. Until 2010 he was the FLOSS C ...

Elizabeth Krumbach Elizabeth or Elisabeth may refer to: People * Elizabeth (given name), a female given name (including people with that name) * Elizabeth (biblical figure), mother of John the Baptist Ships * HMS ''Elizabeth'', several ships * ''Elisabeth'' (sch ...

2013

Behdad Esfahbod Seyed Behdad Esfahbod MirHosseinZadeh Sarabi ( fa, سید بهداد اسفهبد میر حسین‌زاده سرابی; born September 27, 1982) is an Iranian-Canadian software engineer and free software developer. He was a software engineer ...

HarfBuzz HarfBuzz (loose transliteration of Persian calque ''harf-bāz'', literally "open type") is a software development library for text shaping, which is the process of converting Unicode text to glyph indices and positions. The newer version, ''Ne ...

Jessica McKellar Jessica Tess McKellar is an American software developer, engineering manager, and author. Education McKellar attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and studied computer science and chemistry. Work McKellar was an early employee and ...

- Python Software Foundation * Limor Fried - Adafruit Industries *

Valerie Aurora Valerie Anita Aurora is a software engineer and feminist activist. She was the co-founder of the Ada Initiative, a non-profit organization that sought to increase women's participation in the free culture movement, open source technology, and ...

Ada Initiative The Ada Initiative was a non-profit organization that sought to increase women's participation in the free culture movement, open source technology and open culture. The organization was founded in 2011 by Linux kernel developer and open source a ...

Paul Fenwick Paul Joseph Fenwick (born 25 August 1969) is a Canadian retired international soccer player. Born in England, he made 33 appearances for the Canada national team. He later worked as a physiotherapist with the Canada national team. Club caree ...

Perl Perl is a family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it also referred to its redesigned "sister language", Perl 6, before the latter's name was offici ...

* Martin Michlmayr -

Debian Debian (), also known as Debian GNU/Linux, is a Linux distribution composed of free and open-source software, developed by the community-supported Debian Project, which was established by Ian Murdock on August 16, 1993. The first version of D ...

Project

2014

Sage Weil Sage Weil (born March 17, 1978) is the founder and chief architect of Ceph, a distributed storage platform. He also was the creator of WebRing, a co-founder of Los Angeles-based hosting company DreamHost, and the founder and CTO of Inktank. We ...

- Ceph * Deb Nicholson -

MediaGoblin GNU MediaGoblin (also shortened to MediaGoblin or GMG) is a free, decentralized Web platform (server software) for hosting and sharing many forms of digital media. It strives to provide an extensible, federated, and freedom-respectful softwa ...

and OpenHatch.org * John "Warthog9" Hawley - gitweb and

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

kernel site kernel.org * Erin Petersen -

Outercurve Foundation The Outercurve Foundation was an independent 501(c)(6) non-profit corporation founded by Microsoft. Its goal was to "enable the exchange of code and understanding among software companies and open source communities." They ran several software ...

and Girl Develop It * Patrick Volkerding -

Slackware Linux Slackware is a Linux distribution created by Patrick Volkerding in 1993. Originally based on Softlanding Linux System, Slackware has been the basis for many other Linux distributions, most notably the first versions of SUSE Linux distributions ...

2015

Doug Cutting Douglass Read Cutting is a software designer, advocate, and creator of open-source search technology. He founded two technology projects, Lucene, and Nutch, with Mike Cafarella. Both projects are now managed through the Apache Software Foundatio ...

Sarah Mei Sarah (born Sarai) is a biblical matriarch and prophetess, a major figure in Abrahamic religions. While different Abrahamic faiths portray her differently, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all depict her character similarly, as that of a pious ...

Christopher Webber Christopher Webber (born 27 May 1953) is an English musicologist, dramatist, actor, theatre director and writer. Biography Webber was born in Bowdon, Cheshire (now Greater Manchester) and educated at The Manchester Grammar School and the Univ ...

Stefano Zacchiroli Stefano Zacchiroli is an Italian and French academic and computer scientist who lives and works in Paris, and a former Debian Project Leader. Debian involvement Zacchiroli became a Debian Developer in 2001. After attending LinuxTag in 2004, he ...

Marina Zhurakhinskaya A marina (from Spanish , Portuguese and Italian : ''marina'', "coast" or "shore") is a dock or basin with moorings and supplies for yachts and small boats. A marina differs from a port in that a marina does not handle large passenger ships or ...

2016

Sage Sharp Sage Sharp (formerly Sarah Sharp) is a software engineer who has worked on the Linux kernel, including serving on the Linux Foundation's Technical Advisory Board for two years. Sharp began working on the kernel in 2006 as an undergraduate at Po ...

Rikki Endsley Rikki is a given name of feminine and masculine usage. It is of European, East Asian, and South Asian origins. Notable people with the name include: Rikki(born 1990), Jewish-American pop princess * Rikki (Japanese singer) (born 1975), Japanese folk ...

* VM (Vicky) Brasseur *

Máirín Duffy Maureen is a female given name. In Gaelic, it is Máirín, a pet form of ''Máire'' (the Irish cognate of Mary), which is derived from the Hebrew Miriam. The name has sometimes been regarded as corresponding to the male given name Maurice. Some n ...

Marijn Haverbeke Marijn is a Dutch unisex given name derived from Marinus.Marijn
at the

2017

William John Sullivan William John Sullivan (more commonly known as John Sullivan; born December 6, 1976) is a software freedom activist, hacker, and writer. John was formerly executive director of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), where he has worked since early 20 ...

, Executive Director,

Free Software Foundation The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 501(c)#501(c)(3), 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman on October 4, 1985, to support the free software movement, with the organization's preference for software being distributed ...

. *

Nithya Ruff Nithya may refer to * Nithya Das, Indian film actress * Nithya Mammen, Indian playback singer * Nithya Menen (born 1988), Indian film actress * Nithya Ram (born 1990), Indian television and film actress * Nithya Raman, Indian-born American urban p ...

, Head of Open Source Program Office at Amazon,

Linux Foundation The Linux Foundation (LF) is a non-profit technology consortium founded in 2000 as a merger between Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group to standardize Linux, support its growth, and promote its commercial adoption. Additi ...

, Boards of Directors. *

Tony Sebro Tony may refer to: People and fictional characters * Tony (given name), including a list of people and fictional characters * Gregory Tony (born 1978), American law enforcement officer * Motu Tony (born 1981), New Zealand international rugby leagu ...

, General Counsel,

Software Freedom Conservancy Software Freedom Conservancy, Inc. is an organization that provides a non-profit home and infrastructure support for free and open source software projects. The organization was established in 2006, and as of June 2022, had over 40 member pro ...

;

Outreachy Outreachy (previously the Free and Open Source Software Outreach Program for Women) is a program that organizes three-month paid internships with free and open-source software projects for people who are typically underrepresented in those project ...

coordinator. * Katie McLaughlin, BeeWare / KatieConf. *

Juan González Gómez Juan González Gómez "Obijuan" (née Juan González Gómez, born January 18, 1973, in Madrid, Spain) is a doctor in computer science and telecommunications publicly recognized for having become the first Spanish winner of the O'Reilly Open Sourc ...

, R&D Engineer & Member of the CloneWars and FPGAwars communities

2018

In 2018 the winner of each award was determined through open voting from nominees selected by O'Reilly. * Most Impact Award: Kubernetes * Breakout Project of the Year:

HashiCorp HashiCorp is a software company with a freemium business model based in San Francisco, California. HashiCorp provides open-source tools and commercial products that enable developers, operators and security professionals to provision, secure, run ...

- Vault * Lifetime Achievement Award:

2019

* Most Impact Award:

Let's Encrypt Let's Encrypt is a non-profit certificate authority run by Internet Security Research Group (ISRG) that provides X.509 certificates for Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption at no charge. It is the world's largest certificate authority, used ...

* Breakout Project of the Year: Kotlin * Lifetime Achievement Award:

References

External links

Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards - Hall of Fame

O'Reilly Open Source Awards 2010

OSCON 2010: O'Reilly Open Source Awards
(photo)
OSCON 2011: O'Reilly Open Source Awards

OSCON 2011: O'Reilly Open Source Awards
(video)
Geek Feminism Wiki: Google O'Reilly Open Source Award
{{DEFAULTSORT:O'Reilly Open Source Award winners Lists of award winners Free-software awards Free software Computer science awards O'Reilly Media Awards established in 2005