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Is this the first Turing Award for writing free software? As opposed to papers, I mean.

(They did mention his papers, but it seems clear that the software was more important.)

Leslie Lamport primarily won it for his work on distributed systems, but LaTeX is also mentioned.

ritchie and thompson?

Unix wasn't free software (until recently), but it's true that the software was more important than the numerous papers and books about it.