2007: Guido van Rossum
The Python programming language is known for many things. Most important, it pays homage to Monty Python's Flying Circus. It is a dynamic, object-oriented language with simple, yet efficient, high-level data structures. Guido van Rossum, the originator of Python, emphasized readability and ease of use and reuse. Python's elegance has made it an increasingly attractive tool for scripting, rapid application development, and general programming. We believe that developers are attracted to Python because such thought was put into making the syntax obvious and simple; for instance, Python, unlike most other dynamic languages, uses indentation to group statements.

In an article describing his first experiences with Python, Eric S. Raymond wrote, "The long-term usefulness of a language comes not in its ability to support clever hacks, but from how well and how unobtrusively it supports the day-to-day work of programming."* Python is open source, free software. In fulfillment of van Rossum's original goals, the community of Python programmers has spread across multiple operating systems and hardware platforms.

In light of his contributions in the STUG spirit and to the realization of a major enabling technology, USENIX recognizes Guido van Rossum with the 2007 STUG Award.

* This quote found at http://www.python.org/about/success/esr/

2006: Bram Cohen
The FTP and HTTP protocols and user clients have served our community well as mechanisms for distributing and sharing many different types of files. However, they were designed without considering how network bandwidth was provided or the current interconnected nature of the network. By April 2001, at least one person was convinced that a more decentralized method of file distribution was possible, and he began to create a program codifying his ideas. At the end of that summer he released it. That program, BitTorrent, has grown into one of the most popular file distribution methods on the Internet. Its popularity is particularly notable in the free and open source software communities, which, like the protocol, are themselves decentralized.

USENIX feels that BitTorrent is a software tool that, like the namesake of this award, provides “significant enablement” to users of the Internet and makes files, regardless of content, much more widely available to all. We would like to recognize its author, Bram Cohen, for his contribution to the community.

2005: Miguel de Icaza and Mattias Ettrich
The UNIX Command Line User Interface (CLI), while widely recognized as being efficient, has often been attacked by non-UNIX users as not user-friendly. In response, many GUIs have been added to UNIX over the years, but most were generally considered inferior to non-UNIX GUIs.

In October of 1996 and August of 1997, two projects were started to produce desktops that were easy to use, adhered to traditional UNIX philosophies, and gave access to all of the underlying features of the CLI.

While these desktops competed with each other, they also lent strength to each other and have now produced a range of applications that we collectively call KDE and GNOME. These applications have eased implementations of the UNIX operating system in the non-technical marketplace. Most important, by embracing the concepts of free and open source software, these two desktop projects offered freely distributed code, which allowed any distribution or software developer to utilize these graphical features.

The USENIX Association would like to recognize both of these groups for creating a very portable set of libraries, tools, and applications.

2004: M. Douglas McIlroy
When people think of UNIX, many things come to mind. Certainly there were smaller operating systems, but few that did so much in so little space. There were operating systems better at real time, some that were better at timesharing or some other specific function.

The one thing, however, that most people think about when they think of UNIX is the power of the command line interface and the elegance of the pipe and filter model. While many people have added to this interface, contributing tools and programs over the years, one name stands out as a significant contributor, one who originally wrote some of the most basic and timeless tools for this system.

Doug McIlroy helped develop the concept of pipes and stream processing. In order to demonstrate the concept of stream programming, he wrote the original UNIX version of such tools as sort(1), spell(1), diff(1), join(1), graph(1), speak(1), and tr(1), among others.

He also had a major influence on the design of macros. In addition, he has made contributions to various computer languages such as Lisp, PL/1, and TMG, and he helped influence Snobol, Altran, and C++.

It is for these contributions to the development of small, reusable tools, the very basis of the STUG award, that USENIX is proud to have given the STUG Award for 2004 to M. Douglas McIlroy.

2003: CVS (the Concurrent Versioning System)
Without CVS, it wouldn't be possible for any number of people to work on the same code without interfering with each other. It can be argued that without remote-collaboration tools such as CVS, most of the larger Free and Open Source software that is available today could not have existed, for while individuals can produce significant software, collaborative methods are often needed for complex and wide-ranging projects. Therefore USENIX awards the 2003 STUG award to the CVS program and its four main authors, Dick Grune, Brian Berliner, Jeff Polk, and Jim Kingdon, authors of modern CVS, arguably the essential enabling technology of distributed development.

• Dick Grune: The original author of the CVS shell script, written in July 1986, Dick is also credited with many of the CVS conflict resolution algorithms. He developed the script at the Free University of Amsterdam (Vrije Universiteit), where he teaches principles of programming languages and compiler construction. He was involved in constructing Algol 68 compilers in the 1970s and participated in the Amsterdam Compiler Kit in the 1980s. He is co-author of three books: Programming Language Essentials, Modern Compiler Design, and Parsing Techniques: A Practical Guide.
• Brian Berliner: Coder and designer of the first translation of the CVS scripts to the C language, in April 1989, Brian based his design on the original work done by Dick Grune.
• Jeff Polk: Jeff rewrote most of the code of CVS 1.2. He made just about everything dynamic (by using malloc), added a generic hashed list manager, rewrote the modules' database parsing in a compatible but extended way, generalized directory hierarchy recursion for virtually all the commands, generalized the loginfo file to be used for pre-commit checks and commit templates, wrote a new and flexible RCS parser, fixed an uncountable number of bugs, and helped in the design of future CVS features.
• Jim Kingdon: While at Cygnus, in 1993 Jim made the first remote CVS, which ran over TCP or rsh or kerberos'd rsh, and eventually over TCP/IP. The remote-CVS protocol enabled real use of CVS by the open source community; before remote CVS, everyone had to log in to a central server, copy their patches there, etc. Some years later, Jim formed Cyclic, a company which offered CVS support and development.

2002: The Apache Foundation

2001: Kerberos
The 2001 Annual Award recipients are those who contributed to the development of Kerberos, a security system that set the standard for authentication and key management in distributed systems. Kerberos is a security system that set the standard for authentication and key management in distributed systems, is based on the revolutionary Needham and Schroeder protocol of 1978. It is a prime example of how to turn a theoretical result into a useful system. The need for authenticating users and services in a distributed environment is critical, and Kerberos provides a solution that is secure, relatively simple to administer, and scalable. Because of this, Kerberos has been implemented as part of the Distributed Computer Environment (DCE), the Andrew File Systems (AFS), and is also part of Windows 2000. No single security system has had as much impact on the way security is managed in distributed networks as Kerberos. Read the acceptance remarks and special thanks for the 2001 Stug award.

2000: Tatu Ylönen
The 2000 Annual Award goes to Tatu Ylönen for his work developing SSH. The SSH Secure Shell encrypts all traffic, and provides a high level of protection against hacker attacks. SSH provides secure remote logins and remote command execution, key management functions, terminal emulation, fully integrated file transfers, and tunneling of X11 traffic. In addition it has been incorporated into other tools such as rsync for secure remote administration tasks. SSH introduced a simple yet robust protocol at a time when encryption over the Internet was rare, and enjoyed rapid and wide deployemnt.

Tatu Ylönen developed SSH while a graduate student at the Helsinki University of Technology in Finland in the early 1990s. He is a founder of SSH Communications Security.

1999: Udi Manber
The 1999 award went to Udi Manber for turning algorithms into tools for searching and resource discovery. Udi Manber is the Chief Scientist at Yahoo!. Before joining Yahoo! in 1998, he was a professor of Computer Science at the University of Arizona. He wrote more than 50 technical articles, 3 of which won best paper awards, co-developed Agrep, Glimpse, Harvest, and the Search Broker, and wrote a popular textbook on design of algorithms.

1998: John Ousterhout
The 1998 award went to John Ousterhout for Tcl/Tk, the software tools for which he is best known. Together or separately, Tcl/Tk are much used, and they exhibit the spirit that STUG was founded to encourage: portability, adaptability to seemingly unfriendly environments, and clarity of concept.

1997: Larry Wall
The 1997 award went to Larry Wall in recognition of his major contributions to software portability and re-use of code, embodied in the public domain 'Config' program and the Perl language.