[OSGeo-Announce] Arnulf Christl Receives Sol Katz Award

[Frank Warmerdam]

Arnulf Christl was honored Friday with the 2013 Sol Katz Award for
Geospatial Free and Open Source Software during the FOSS4G 2013
conference in Notthingham, UK. The award was presented by Jeff
McKenna, the president of OSGeo. Arnulf's dedication to open source
geospatial software, and the community and ideals around it are widely
recognised. He played a large role in the Mapbender project, and was a
founding director of OSGeo, as well as serving as president for
several years. He has also been a key bridge between OSGeo and the
Open Geospatial Consortium, emphasizing the duality of open source and
open standards. He continues to advocate for these ideals inside and
outside OSGeo.

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.