by on August 12, 2026
I had the honor of giving the introduction for the 2026 Distinguished Service Award in Software Freedom. The video of ceremony will be available in the coming weeks, but I share below that introduction now. Congratulations to Mark on this well-deserved award.
I'm up here now to announce the second annual winner of the Distinguished Service Award for Software Freedom.
In preparation, I'll tell you the story of one of the dozens of incidents in my FOSS career that convinced me that FOSS events like this one are essential to advance communities that spend 99% of its time collaborating over the Internet.
16 years ago — almost to the day — I stood in line to register for GUADEC 2010 in The Hague in the Netherlands. This was my first GNOME conference,and frankly as a command-line geek who only uses a GUI to make more xterms and Emacs frames on a screen, I was feeling nervous about attending.
Behind me in registration line, I heard exclamations from a young Dutch man with rosy cheeks and huge smile. He couldn't contain his excitement in blurting out: “You are … You must be … Bradley Kuhn!!!!”
I turned to face him fully and said: “wait, you, you are mjw, aren't you? You are the guy who wrote Classpath!”
Mark answered with what I'd soon learn was his true humility: “Well, you know, I didn't write Classpath, I mean, YOU are the one who NAMED it Classpath … and well, there was already a lot of code when I took over.”
I already knew Mark Wielaard to be a dedicated, kind, and humble FOSS developer from our email exchanges in the early 2000s. But spending time with him at GUADEC 2010 — really getting to know the whole person who is “mjw” — was one of the best experiences of my career.
I boarded the flight back home thinking: “What a joy it is to have such people in the FOSS community! What great work we will all do together if all of us are like mjw!”
Mark didn't rest on his laurels after his Classpath work. He worked on the GCC front-end for Java. Then, when Sun (and later Oracle) released some of their Java code, he lead the IcedTea project that integrated the Sun OpenJDK code-dumps with existing Classpath work.
Today, he continues work in FOSS by maintaining the low-level key infrastructural project elfutils, and the Valgrind dynamic software analysis tool. Even with all that funded work, he still finds the time to serve the community as an essential volunteer maintaining the oldest and most prestigious Free Software code-hosting site, Sourceware.org.
For me, the only sad part about this moment for is that there is only one Mark, not a thousand. No, I am not trying cloning experiments in my basement to make more Marks! But I had hoped that day — 16 years ago on that plane — that the FOSS community would be filled with people like Mark. I have come to realize that his optimism, dedication, focus, and care are EXCEEDINGLY rare traits in our community. We should all aspire to approach FOSS in the manner that Mark does, and I hope all of you will take time at this event to learn from Mark how to improve as a FOSS contributor! He has a wealth of knowledge and wisdom to share — and he will share it with us willingly with kindness.
It's for that reason that I nominated — and easily received wholehearted, universal agreement from everyone at Software Freedom Conservancy — that Mark receive this second annual Distinguished Service award.
In addition to this lucite award, this honor includes a ten billion binary US Dollar cash prize. (For those that prefer decimal, that's USD $1,024. Mark's contributions are so significant that I deeply wish we could wave a magic wand and dub him a DECIMAL billionaire, because people as wonderful as Mark really should rule the world.
Mark, please come up on stage!
I am proud and honored to present you with this Second Annual FOSS Distinguished Service Award.
Please email any comments on this entry to info@sfconservancy.org.