Call for Nominations for Two Awards

by the USENIX Awards Committee
<[email protected]>

The USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award
The USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award is to recognize and celebrate singular contributions to the UNIX community in both intellectual achievement and service that are not recognized in any other forum. The award itself is in the form of an original glass sculpture called "the Flame," and in the case of a team based at a single place, a plaque for the team office. The award is presented on June 21 at the Annual USENIX Technical Conference, in San Diego, CA.

Past recipients of the USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award are the Computer Science Research Group at the University of California at Berkeley (and a cast of thousands) for the BSD line; Van Jacobson, and Mike Lesk for their contributions to networking technology; Tom Truscott, Steve Bellovin, and Jim Ellis for their work in creating USENET; the Software Tools Users Group for popularizing a new vision of operating system software, offering a bridge to portability and power for those limited by proprietary operating systems; Brian Kernighan for the books, tools, and insights into the use of language as a bridge between people and machines; Tim Berners-Lee for spinning the Web that has helped to transform the Internet into a fundamental part of everyday life and for his continued evangelism on its behalf; and the X Window System Community at Large.

The Software Tools Users Group Award
The Software Tools Award recognizes significant contributions to the general community that reflect the spirit and character of those who came together to form the Software Tools Users Group (STUG). This is a cash award.

STUG and the Software Tools effort was characterized by two important tenets. The first was an extraordinary focus on building portable, reusable libraries of code shared among multiple applications on wildly disparate systems. The other tenet, shared with the UNIX community, is "renegade empowerment."

The Software Tools Users Group gave users the power to improve their environment when their platform provider proved inadequate, even when local management sided with the platform provider. Therefore, nominees for the Software Tools Award should exhibit one or both of these traits in a conspicuous manner: a contribution to the reusable code-base available to all, or provsion of a significant enabling technology directly to users in a widely available form.

Past recipients of this award are Michael Tiemann for the production of G++, the GNU C++ Compiler; Larry Wall in recognition of his major contributions to software portability and reuse of code embodied in the public domain Config program and the Perl language; John Ousterhout for Tcl/Tk, the software tools for which he is best known; and Udi Manber for turning algorithms into tools for searching and resource discovery.

How to Nominate
If you believe someone qualifies for either of these awards, we (the nominating committee) welcome your input. Please send us your nomination by April 15, 2000, and include your name, details of the achievement, and your reasons for making the nomination. Send email to <[email protected]>.

The members of the awards committee are Andrew Hume, chair; Jon "maddog" Hall, Mike O'Dell, Dennis Ritchie, Margo Seltzer, and Ellie Young.