ZEISS Group’s Salute to Open Source Excellence: The winners of our 3rd FOSS Awards

Since 2022 we have been asking colleagues within the various business segments of ZEISS: What software under a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) license improves your daily productivity? What FOSS library is taking your product’s capabilities one step further to properly address our customers’ requirements? Choose your favorites!

Members of the Open Source Program Office of the ZEISS Group evaluating the results of our employee survey.

Based on their feedback, we are now – for the third time – celebrating the winners of this contest with our FOSS Award and a donation of 3.000 EUR per FOSS project:

  • The Debian Project – No introduction required. One of the oldest, most mature, and community-maintained GNU/Linux distributions. It serves as a basis for many other popular distributions and runs as one of the most reliable operating systems in many infrastructures as well as personal appliances. And did you know, the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) are the foundation for what is now commonly known as “Open Source”?
    The donation goes to its largest European developer and user community, Debian France.
  • The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) – Without a proper compiler there would not be GNU/Linux and any user application running on top of it. GCC has served this purpose since 1987.
    The donation goes to its parent organization, the Free Software Foundation.
  • GStreamer – A multimedia framework providing the full range of media handling functionality, from simple playback and recording to complex mixing and non-linear editing tasks. It runs on various Carl Zeiss Meditec AG surgical devices, including TIVATO 700 and KINEVO 900, and is the default choice of the GNOME desktop environment.
    The donation goes to the GStreamer Foundation.
  • LaTeX – A typesetting framework with a large user base especially within the scientific world. It is used for to create slides, journal articles, theses and university exams. It is also our preference when educating ZEISS employees about the amazing potential of Free and Open Source Software.
    The donation goes to its German user group DANTE e.V.
  • PuTTY – How best to access and maintain your Linux-based infrastructure from a Windows machine? The answer is PuTTY, which builds bridges based on SSH and telnet between these mostly incompatible system environments.
    The donation goes to its original maintainer Simon.

With this initiative we want to say thank you! For the maintainers’ efforts on developing and maintaining Free and Open Source Software, which contributes also to the success of the ZEISS Group and our customers. For more detailed information, see our last post.

This post was written by:

Holger Streidl

Holger is running the Open Source Program Office of the ZEISS group. He joined ZEISS in 2019 to work full-time on his passion for Free and Open Source Software. Prior to ZEISS, he worked for more than a decade in Health IT with GE Healthcare, the University Hospital of Heidelberg and the Helmholtz Zentrum München. He studied computer science at the TU Munich, the Tampere University of Technology, and the University of Leipzig.

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