Gary Sherman was honored last week with the 2014 Sol Katz Award for Geospatial Free and Open Source Software during the FOSS4G 2014 conference in Portland, Oregon, US. This was the tenth year of the award. Gary is the founder of the QGIS project (or Quantum GIS), a desktop Open Source GIS that has become one of the most popular projects today, with a huge user and developer community. He began development of QGIS back in 2002, and it was approved as an OSGeo project in 2008. Gary’s work and passion for “open” has touched the lives of millions.
Gary’s acceptance video http://vimeo.com/106310099
== Background ==
The Sol Katz Award for Geospatial Free and Open Source Software is awarded annually by OSGeo to individuals who have demonstrated leadership in the GFOSS community. Recipients of the award will have contributed significantly through their activities to advance open source ideals in the geospatial realm. The hope is that the award will both acknowledge the work of community members, and pay tribute to one of its founders, for years to come. Sol Katz was an early pioneer of GFOSS and left behind a large body of work in the form of applications, format specifications, and utilities. In the early 80’s, Sol assisted in the development of a public domain GIS package called MOSS (Map Overlay and Statistical System). This software was arguably the first open source GIS software in the world. Sol would later go on to release and maintain PC MOSS. He was also one of the first involved in public data translator utilities. Utilities that he developed for converting DEMs and reading SDTS files were contributed back to the geospatial community, and are still available today. Sol was also a frequent contributor to many geospatial list servers, providing much guidance to the geospatial community at large. Sadly, after fighting Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma for almost a decade, Sol died April 23, 1999 in bed. His legacy will always live on in the GFOSS world.
