I just came back from FOSDEM and it is true :-) Theo got an award and
lots of pictures were taken of the event.
RMS started his speech with the progress free software made: GNU
userland tools, but they lacked a free kernel. This is where Linux came
to the rescue.
Then he stated that more recently there came a new problem: the BIOS,
which used to be in ROM (in the old days) but now is in Flash, is still
unfree. This turned out to be a big deal to Stallman (although I
personally don't mind at all); the FSF website has a special item about
this (http://www.fsf.org/free-bios/). At this moment, I tought the
LinuxBIOS people would receive the award :-)
But then he started taking about non-free firmware. The award winner did
a lot of activism in this area, forcing companies to free their
firmware. Now it became clear to me who would win the award. Then he
mentioned OpenSSH and eventially named Theo; he did not mention OpenBSD :-(
So Theo mainly receive the award for recent free WLAN firmware activism.
The award itself wasn't impressive: a sort of flag with a gnu Stallman
nitted himself, or that is what it looked like :-D
Theo thanked Richie and started by asking how many people every used
OpenSSH :-) He named some of the bad companies; it was a fairly long
list (TI, Intel, Broadcom, Apple and Sun were the worst). He also
mentioned the recent progress which was done by Reyk in reverse
engineering the Atheros firmware; only yesterday support was added for
the ar5211 chip set, the last unsupported Atheros chip set.
That was about it. Nice to see the years of work by Theo and co finally
being recognized by the Free Software Foundation. And some good
publicity as well...