[OSGeo-Announce] Mr. Jeff McKenna Receives Sol Katz Award

[Jorge Sanz]

Mr. Jeff McKenna was honored today with the 2016 Sol Katz Award for
Geospatial Free and Open Source Software during the FOSS4G-2016
conference in Bonn, Germany. The award was announced by Prof.
Venkatesh Raghavan, President, OSGeo Foundation.

The award is presented in recognition of Jeff's deep passion for
FOSS4G and relentless effort to promote OSGeo Foundation around the
world. He has been involved in OSGeo since the foundation was formed
in 2006. The OSGeo Foundation wishes to thank Mr. Jeff McKenna for his
dedication and invaluable contributions towards furthering the goals
and objectives of the OSGeo Foundation.

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. Sol Katz's collection of GIS utilities at the BLM
is still available at ftp://ftp.blm.gov/pub/gis/. 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.