Linus Torvalds has won the 2001 World Technology Award for Commerce. These awards are given by the World Technology Network "to honour those individual leaders or, at times, co-equal teams from across the globe who most contribute to the advance of emerging technologies of all sorts for the benefit of business and society." It honors "those innovators who have done work recently which has the greatest likely future significance and impact over the long-term... and who will likely become or remain 'key players; in the technological drama unfolding in coming years." The group adds that the awards "are about those individuals whose work today will, in our opinion, create the greatest 'ripple effects" in the future... in both expected and unexpected ways."
"Linus Torvalds was selected for his work on Linux and the Open Source Software Paradigm," the Awards site says. "Linus Torvalds wrote the kernel of Linux and established the Open Source software model, which is a revolutionary way of creating software. In doing so, he not only designed one of the most important pieces of software ever, but he also created a new paradigm for software engineering." It continues:
"Linux is one of the most important operating systems, at least as important as UNIX and MSDOS. It is crucial for mobile communication devices, for webservers, for the development of the Internet and for many other areas in computing, networking and information technology.
"Linus Torvalds is not only an outstanding software engineer, but also a global community leader (of the open source software community)."
The winners are announced at the end of each year, so the 2001 Awards were announced at the beginning of 2002. There were awards twenty-three categories, with five finalists in each category. Other winners included:
The full list of award recipients is at Nature: <http://www.nature.com/nature/wta/>