Sol Katz

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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 while at the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. This early GFOSS archive provided both source code and applications freely available to the community. Sol was also a frequent contributor to many geospatial list servers, providing much guidance to the geospatial community at large.

Sol died in 1999 from Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma, but his legacy lives on in the open source world.

Sol Katz (1947-1999) was born in Sweden and moved to New York at the age of 1. Yiddish was his first language, but he was amazingly bright, and learned both Hebrew and English quickly. After high school, he spent three years in the US Air Force, stationed in Germany, where he picked up yet another language. Following his brief military career, he decided to go to Brooklyn College in New York where he got his Bachelors in Geology in 2.5 years. He then married his wife Hedy in 1969, and went back to Brooklyn College while teaching in New York Public Schools and got his MA, also in Geology. After several years working for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in several states, he settled down in Lakewood, CO and decided to go back to school at the University of Denver in Computer Science and earned a second Masters degree. At this time, he also had two children - Shanna and Risa. He was well loved in his office, at his children's school, and at home. Always full of laughter and good humor, Sol could easily be recognized by his flamboyant Hawaiian shirts and toucan or propeller hats. Sadly, after fighting Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma for almost a decade, Sol died April 23, 1999 in bed.

[edit] GFOSS Award

The Sol Katz Award for Geospatial Free and Open Source Software (GFOSS) will be given 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.^[1]

2005 - Frank Warmerdam - Developer of the GDAL/OGR library
2006 - Markus Neteler - GRASS GIS developer since 1998 and founding-member of Open Source Geospatial Foundation ( OSGeo )
2007 - Steve Lime - Leader of the MapServer Project