About the award

Current awardees

Past awardees

This page is dedicated to the Cygwin Gold Star award. The award is given to people who have pleased one of the Cygwin project leads (CGF and Corinna) by their actions or contributions. Each star is a link detailing the circumstances in which it was awarded.

• Jason DePriest (Nov 2009) -- For reminding us of the right way to handle a FAQ
• Shaddy Baddah (Sep 2009) -- For nicely summarizing the need to have a c:\cygwin
• Ralph Hempel (Jul 2009) (Jul 2009) -- For tireless support of the setup.exe command line
• Eric Blake × 2 (Jan 2005) (May 2005) (Feb 2006) (Nov 2006) (Jul 2009) -- For obsoleting ash, and its attendant stone-age code
• Dave Korn (Jan 2004) (Mar 2004) (Sep 2004) (Jun 2005) (Feb 2006) (Nov 2006) (Mar 2007) (Jul 2009) -- For persistence in fixing problems in the new gcc4 libstdc++6 and libgfortran3 packages
• Jon Turney × 5 (Jul 2009) -- For taking over co-maintenance of Cygwin/X, after years of neglect
• Yaakov Selkowitz (Sep 2005) (Jul 2007) × 5 (Jul 2009) -- For taking over co-maintenance of Cygwin/X, after years of neglect
• Andrew Schulman (Aug 2005) (Jul 2006) (Feb 2007) (Jul 2007) (Jul 2009) -- For volunteering to maintain the gold star page
• Andrew Punch (May 2009) -- For adding the package search feature in setup.exe (hear, hear)
• Charles (Chuck) Wilson × 5 (Dec 2006) (Jun 2007) (Apr 2008) (Apr 2008) (Mar 2009) -- For obviating the dreaded TS hack
• Brian Dessent (May 2004) (Sep 2004) × 2 (Apr 2005) (Jun 2006) (Dec 2008) -- For patience, insight, and helpfulness on the mailing lists
• Christopher G. Faylor (a.k.a. CGF) × 20 (Apr 2004) (Feb 2005) (July 2008) -- For keeping the mailing lists on topic. Go CGF!
• Matt Wozniski (June 2008) -- For pointing out what should have been obvious
• Max Bowsher (Nov 2003) (Apr 2008) -- For lifetime contribution to the Cygwin project
• Volker Zell (Nov 2003) (Sep 2005) (Apr 2007) (Jul 2007) (Dec 2007) (Mar 2008) -- For being the go-to guy for GTG
• Lapo Luchini (Jan 2006) (Aug 2007) (Dec 2007) -- For taking over the orphaned nano package
• Jari Aalto (Aug 2007) (Dec 2007) -- For adopting the essential but orphaned editrights package, as well as joe
• Warren Young (Sep 2007) -- For explaining clearly why security is hard
• Jon Allen (Nov 2005) × 2 (Nov 2006) (Aug 2007) -- For adopting the tnef package
• David Rothenberger (Jul 2003) (Jun 2005) (Jul 2007) -- For relieving some of Corinna's maintainer load and the long overdue update of the xiph libao packages
• Chris Sutcliffe (Nov 2006) (Apr 2007) (Jul 2007) -- For taking over maintainership of the orphaned hexedit
• Jan Nieuwenhuizen × 2 (Jul 2007) -- For quietly taking over the orphaned libfontconfig1 and libfontconfig-devel packages (slightly retroactive)
• Steffen Sledz (Jul 2007) -- For efforts in adopting a tough package (emacs)
• Reini Urban (Oct 2004) (Oct 2004) (Aug 2006) (Jul 2007) -- For being mentally prepared to take over maintainership for perl
• Pierre A. Humblet (Jun 2003) × 5 (May 2004) × 2 (May 2004) -- For taking over cron
• Phil Betts (Mar 2007) -- For not being afraid to climb on that ol' soapbox re: 3PPs
• Joshua Daniel Franklin (Mar 2003) × 2 × 2 (Dec 2006) -- For his highly appreciated commitment to maintaining Cygwin documentation over the last couple of years
• Volker Quetschke (Nov 2006) -- For picking up the problematic ImageMagick package and making it functional
• Matthew Woehlke (Jul 2006) (Aug 2006) -- For wisely redirecting what could have been an HTML email flame war into the hippo zone
• Tanya Blake, Molly Franklin, and all of our wives (Jul 2005) (Mar 2006) -- For their invaluable efforts in bringing future cygwin users into the world
• James R. Phillips (Feb 2006) -- For taking over the orphaned ghostscript
• Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes (Jul 2004) × 2 (Jan 2005) × 2 (Jan 2006) -- For pointing out that package maintainers should use snapshots
• Igor Peshansky (né Pechtchanski) (Apr 2003) (Jul 2003) (Nov 2003) (Jan 2006) -- For tracking down incorrect identification of non-Cygwin processes and sticking by it.
• Antony Baxter (Oct 2005) -- For "a nice comeback" (a.k.a. seeing that fiddler crab)
• Alan Hourihane × 2 (Aug 2005) -- For the offer to take over Cygwin/X maintainership
• Larry Hall × 3 (Apr 2005) (Jun 2005) -- For the most on-topic and painful pun
• Max Kaehn (Jun 2005) -- For the truly heroic effort of understanding and documenting how cygtls works
• Karl M. (May 2003) (Jun 2005) -- For the "Cygwin night at the OSCAs" concept (need I say more?)
• Corinna Vinschen × 5 (Jul 2003) × 2 (Dec 2004) -- For biting the bullet and releasing coreutils (to ease CGF's guilt)
• Brian Ford (Nov 2003) (Jun 2004) × 2 (Nov 2004) -- For spearheading the dwarf-2 effort for Cygwin
• Dave Kilroy (Oct 2004) -- For going above and beyond the expected volunteer effort (with the chere package)
• Robert R. Schneck-McConnell (Jan 2004) (Oct 2004) -- For an attempt to apply a creative solution to a problem
• Jason Tishler × 2 (Oct 2004) -- For years of PostgreSQL support (retroactive) and for being a long time contributor to Cygwin
• James Hu (Jun 2004) -- For volunteering to take over cURL
• Kevin P. Roth (Jun 2004) -- For years of cURL service (retroactive)
• Gareth Pearce (Apr 2004) -- For educating the community on gcc versioning
• Matthew O. Persico (Apr 2004) -- For "sheer cleverness" (a.k.a. saying it with sheet music)
• Anonymous contributor × 10 (Apr 2004) -- For contributing a brand new 64-bit Windows system
• Philippe Ritter (Dec 2003) -- For actually testing a snapshot unbidden and reporting that it fixed a problem
• Ronald Landheer-Cieslak (Nov 2003) -- For taking over splint
• Harold L. Hunt II (Nov 2003) -- For taking over links
• Frank Richter × 7 (Nov 2003) -- For making Cygwin setup resizeable
• Gary R. Van Sickle × 3 (Nov 2003) -- For numerous Cygwin setup contributions leading to resizeability
• Gerrit P. Haase × 5 (Oct 2003) -- For heroically taking over gcc
• Daniel Reed (Oct 2003) -- For being a great package coordinator on cygwin-apps
• Mark Blackburn (Aug 2003) -- For volunteering to maintain lftp
• Abraham Backus (Jul 2003) -- For being the first to recompile his package for Cygwin 1.5.0
• Dario Alcocer (May 2003) -- For being an example of reasonable discussion on the list
• Randall Roy Schulz (Apr 2003) (Apr 2003) -- For suggesting "cygcheck as an attachment"
• Elfyn McBratney (who prefers self-made stars) (Mar 2003) (Mar 2003) -- For standing up and enforcing the GPL
• Eric Fifer Apr 2000 -- For enlightening people on the properties of /cygdrive