[OSGeo-Announce] Gary Sherman Receives Sol Katz Award

[Frank Warmerdam]

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
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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.
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