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Richard M Stallman, Ken Sakamura and Linus Torvalds receive 2001 Takeda Award

From the Free Software Foundation

The Takeda Foundation of Japan has named Richard M Stallman, president of the Free Software Foundation and founder of the GNU project, as co-recipient of the 2001 Takeda Award. As part of this honor, Stallman will receive a monetary award of approximately 33 million yen (currently about US$268,000). Dr. Stallman receives this honor for launching the Free Software Movement and leading the development of the GNU operating system. GNU, started by Stallman in 1984, is a completely Free Software operating system: it gives users the freedom to copy, share, modify and redistribute the software. The Free Software Movement, started along with GNU, advocates and defends these freedoms worldwide. Stallman shares the full 2001 Takeda award of 100 million yen with two other recipients. Ken Sakamura receives the award for developing and promoting the TRON architecture, a real-time operating system specification for embedded systems. Linus Torvalds is honored for his work on the operating system kernel called Linux, which is normally used together with GNU. The GNU/Linux system, which combines GNU and Linux, has over 20 million users worldwide.

More at www.fsf.org/press/2001-12-03-Takeda.html