The European Open Source Awards 2026, an annual program recognizing outstanding contributions to open-source software, has announced this year’s winners.

The awards were presented on January 29, 2026, in Brussels by the European Open Source Academy, an EU-backed initiative promoting open source across Europe.

The top honor, the Prize for Excellence in Open Source Software, was awarded to Greg Kroah-Hartman, a long-time Linux kernel maintainer known for overseeing stable kernel releases and contributing to core subsystems. The award recognizes his decades of technical leadership and stewardship in one of the world’s most widely used open-source projects.