Professor Paul Eggert was awarded the 2021 Advancement of Free Software Award from LibrePlanet’s Free Software Foundation Free Software Awards.
The awards are presented annually by the Free Software Foundation. They recognize “an individual who has made a great contribution to the progress and development of free software through activities that accord with the spirit of free software.” Past recipients of the award include Larry Wall (Perl, 1998), Yukihiro Matsumoto (Ruby, 2011), and Lawrence Lessig of Harvard Law School (“code is law” idea, 2002).
Eggert was recognized for his significant contributions to GNU projects, including the GNU Compiler Collection, better known as GCC. Eggert also maintains the Time Zone Database, serving as the editor and coordinator of the Time Zone Database at the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which is one of the internet’s oldest operational institutions (https://www.cs.ucla.edu/time-zone-king-how-one-ucla-computer-scientist-keeps-digital-clocks-ticking/).