We have started lining up speakers for the 2025 OLF Conference! More are still to be added, so please check back for updates.
Jon “maddog” Hall
Jon “maddog” Hall is the Chairman Emeritus of the Board of the Linux Professional Institute. Since 1969, he has been a programmer, systems designer, systems administrator, product manager, technical marketing manager, author and educator, and is currently working as an independent consultant. Mr. Hall has concentrated on Unix systems since 1980 and Linux systems since 1994, when he first met Linus Torvalds and correctly recognized the commercial importance of Linux and Free and Open Source Software. He has been a tremendous friend to the OLF Conference, offering his support and appearing on our stage starting in 2004. Mr. Hall has traveled the world speaking on the benefits of Open Source Software having received his BS in Commerce and Engineering from Drexel University, and his MSCS from RPI in Troy, New York.
Keynote – Not About Being Free but About Having Control
For many years I talked about Free Software, then Freedom Software, but in reality I should have been talking about control. Having control over our business and our lives. This talk will be around that topic and how the GNU/Linux system can give you that Control.
Catherine Devlin
A freak accident in 1999 transformed Catherine Devlin from a washed-up chemical engineer to a database engineer and, in 2004, a Python programmer. A FOSS community addict, she was the founding chair of PyOhio and is President of the Dayton Dynamic Languages user group. She has keynoted at PyOhio, PyCon US, PyCon Colombia, and OLF. She lives in the woods near Dayton with her wife, horses, and cats. She probably has sticks in her hair.
Graph Data for Heroes II: Rise of the Bot
The 2023 talk Database Superpowers introduced OLF to heroes and villains like Cardinal Virtue, Ohio Gosaimasu, the Wrong Brothers, and the complex mesh of relationships that tie them together. It demonstrated how to describe complex interlinked reality with a knowledge graph, then use graph queries to draw information from it.
This year, we’ll reprise those technologies; then we’ll build a web scraper to automatically gather unstructured text from the web and process it into useful graph data. Help Captain Columbus save Ohio with her FOSS-powered Justice Bot!
Technologies demonstrated include neo4j, Apache AGE, neo4j, scrapy, and relationship extraction. It’s a lot, so we’ll touch on each lightly, but enough to catch your interest and get you started.
Don Vosburg
Don Vosburg has been in the IT industry for over 30 years in a variety of roles. Don’s experiences as an open source contributor, system administrator, architect, presenter, and product manager are augmented by industry certifications from SUSE, Red Hat, Cisco, and others.
For over 20 years he has been at SUSE, which fits well with his passion for open source software. Don’s real-world Linux experience spans a broad set of platforms, hypervisors, containers, and clouds. Currently he is a Product Manager for SUSE Multi-Linux Manager. As such Don is SUSE’s point person for systems management in North America. He is a key member of the roadmap planning and use-case testing teams for SUSE Manager, and a committed member of the Uyuni project community.
He has been married to his wife Diane for more than 40 years, and enjoys telling stories about his four sons and seven grandchildren. He lives in Anderson, Indiana, where he works from home.
Passion and Pragmatism: Open Source for the Rest of Us
Not everyone who desires to contribute to the open source community is a developer. But still there is this passion about giving back, about making a difference, about collaborating. Balance that with a real world that is not 100% open source, and you are confronted with choices! Hear from personal examples how combining passion and pragmatism (with a bit of patience) can make you a valuable member of the open source community.
Elizabeth K. Joseph
Elizabeth K. Joseph is a Linux systems administrator who now leads the Open Source Program Office for IBM Z where she works with the community to explore Linux and z/OS workloads on mainframes.
In the course of her career, she’s worked on Raspberry Pis and Sun SPARC systems and has begun dabbling in RISC-V, so working on non-x86 architectures full time was a natural fit. She has previously worked on distributed systems and has written books on Ubuntu and OpenStack.
Will Your Open Source Project Run on a Mainframe? Or a Watch?
You may have developed your open source project for a single, “default” architecture like x86, but today there is considerable growth in other architectures, from ARM to mainframes to RISC-V.
The talk will present some of the free tools and programs available to open source software developers to port their projects to other architectures.
Jonathan Billings
Jonathan is a Linux sysadmin at Red Hat, managing their fleet of Linux laptops running a corporate spin of Fedora Workstation. He’s been a Linux admin for the past 25 years at a variety of institutions, and a long time Linux user.
Running Fedora Linux Workstation at Scale
Managing enterprise Linux mobile endpoints (usually laptops) at scale can be difficult using the existing tools made for managing Cloud and Server systems. While there are many commercial and open source tools available intended to manage Windows and MacOS mobile endpoints, there are very few for Linux mobile management. I’ve also discovered that managing a fleet of Linux laptops doesn’t follow the traditional Linux management workflow. I will talk about issues my team has encountered, and how we have leveraged Ansible and cloud services to solve our problems.
We have seen great strides in usability and performance of many Linux distributions on modern laptop hardware, and there are benefits in using an Open Source operating system on company devices. However, Linux laptops often operate outside a locked-down managed network, and the devices still need to manage access, perform software updates, identify and address security issues, as well as self-repair. As more employees work from home, there is very little guarantee that the managed Linux device will be attached to a corporate network anymore, so we need to re-think how we apply a managed infrastructure to mobile Linux endpoints. We need to have the ability to apply automation, auditing and account management to remote endpoints in a secure manner, and not expose the internal company resources to the public internet. Ansible is a powerful tool used to manage systems at scale, but tools like Ansible Automation Platform tend to rely on a highly managed networking infrastructure. We will demonstrate how Ansible can still be used to manage Linux mobile endpoints.
This talk should explain what to consider when managing Linux workstations for remote or traveling employees. We will discuss some of the technology we used and how we are changing the way we manage Linux laptops. We’ll also discuss some of the possible ways modern tools might make this easier in the future.
murph
I’m murph, a system administrator in New Jersey, desktop Linux user, hackers.town resident, and EFF member. I’m a long-time attendee at OLF, and a serial presenter.
You can reach me on the fediverse at @murph@masto.hackers.town.
Hacker Public Radio – Why You Should Listen and Contribute
Hacker Public Radio is a community podcast that runs 5 days a week. It is dedicated to sharing knowledge and has been running in various forms for nearly 20 years. Anyone that has anything that is of interest to hackers is welcome to submit a show.
Topics/Skills:
- What is Hacker Public Radio
- How to listen
- How to participate
- Join the mailing list
- Join the matrix room
- Record a show
- record
- submit show for scheduling
- Methods for better audio
- microphone (or whatever)
- Settings to make it better
- You’re now an HPR host!
Steven Pritchard
Steven Pritchard is head of engineering at Sicura, where he is a contributor to various open source projects including Vox Pupuli.
The Great Open Source Rug-Pull
What happens when “open source” projects aren’t so open anymore? In the past few years, corporate license changes have rocked the open-source world, from Red Hat’s shift away from CentOS to Elastic’s closed-license move, from HashiCorp’s Terraform relicensing to Redis Labs’ RSAL pivot. Each time, communities have pushed back, creating forks like AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, OpenSearch, OpenTofu, Valkey, OpenBao, and more.
These aren’t just forks; they’re acts of resistance. This talk takes a candid look at why these rug-pulls keep happening, what they reveal about the changing economics of open source, and how communities are organizing to protect the values that started it all. Expect a mix of history, governance insight, and practical examples of community-driven recovery. If you care about keeping open source open, this session is for you.