The John Lions Award

by Dr. Lucy Chubb
Senior Consultant, Softway Pty Ltd.; President, AUUG
<[email protected]>

We are pleased to announce a second contribution by USENIX of $6,000 to the Lions Award fund. Ted Dolatta and John Mashey designated that the funds received from the auction of the California UNIX license plate be contributed to the fund.

The John Lions Award for Research Work in Open Systems was instituted in 1997 to honor the leading role Lions played in bringing UNIX to Australia, in the formation of AUUG, and in promotion of the values held by the open systems community.

The winner of the inaugural Lions Student Award in 1997 was Jerry Vochteloo, a Ph.D. student at the University of New South Wales. His work involved implementing UNIX-like "rwx" file protection on Mungi Objects (Mungi is a single-address-space object-oriented operating system that is being developed at the University of NSW).

Last year's winner was Steve Blackburn of Australian National University in Canberra, for work involving the creation of an orthogonally persistent version of Java. (I've read that his work has attracted interest from some of the big computer manufacturers.)

Over the past few years, I've heard it asked a number of times whether there is anything interesting going on in the operating system/open systems area. I believe there is. It's just that people aren't seeing it. This award should both encourage good work in the area and publicize the good work that's happening. Please visit <http://www.auug.org.au/lions/> for more information on the John Lions Award.