We are extremely pleased with our lineup for the 2025 OLF Conference! Read on for details about our speakers and their presentations.
Don Vosburg
Don Vosburg has been in the IT industry for over 30 years in a wide variety of roles. Don’s experiences as a system administrator, architect, presenter, and product manager provide depth and breadth to his communications.
His passion for open source software is grounded in hands-on experience. Don’s Linux expertise spans a broad set of platforms, hypervisors, containers, and clouds. He is an expert in systems management and automation – sought after globally to answer questions and solve problems for small and large enterprises. He is a committed member of the Uyuni project community.
He has been tapped for presentations at OpenSource Summit, SAP Insider, SUSE Expert Days, Saltconf, Flourish, LinuxWorld, SUSECon, VM Workshop, OLF, and numerous other venues.
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.
Keynote – 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.
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.
Footnote – 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.
Amber Graner
Amber is a seasoned professional with a rich history in open source communities—Ubuntu, Linaro, Open Compute Project Foundation, Zeek, Kubeflow and more. Currently, she is Head of Community and Developer Relations at SmythOS. She is known for her leadership skills and commitment to inclusivity. Amber served as an all-source intelligence analyst in the US Army and is a decorated combat veteran. Amber brings a unique blend of skills to ignite communication, collaboration and contribution in, near or around open source and actively seeks opportunities to empower individuals and organizations to use the technologies she is working with.
Bless Their Hearts: Open Source, AI, and Southern Survival Skills
What happens when you take a Southern woman, sprinkle in 485 horsepower, add a few decades of open-source cat-herding energy, and drop her into the AI revolution? You get Amber Graner – part Dolly Parton, part data center – bringing grit, grace, and a whole lot of laughter to the chaos of modern tech. A U.S. Army intelligence veteran turned open-source leader, Amber has seen everything from servers that caught fire to mailing lists that did the same, and she’s lived to tell it with humor sharper than a command line typo. In this fast-paced, storytelling-driven session, she shares what happens when AI tools act like toddlers in a Cracker Barrel gift shop, when Linux users defend their editors like SEC football teams, and when tech bros “discover community” like it’s a new superfood. It’s a reminder that Southern problem-solving—where duct tape, determination, and kindness always have a place—still works in a world of prompts and pipelines. With sharp wit and open-source heart, Amber shows how the same survival skills that got her through military life, mailing lists, and machine learning madness can help anyone navigate technology with humor and humanity. No buzzword bingo, no enterprise synergy—just real talk, real stories, and a few “did she really just say that?” moments. It’s tech humor with soul, served with a wink and a little Southern grit.
Bob Fornal
Bob is a Senior Developer with a focus on front-end development: JavaScript, TypeScript, CSS, SVG, Angular, React, React-Native, Vue, and Ionic. He commonly speaks about Cloud CI/CD, Quality Engineering, Best Practices, and Front-End Technologies.
- Owner of Code Squid, LLC.
- Senior Solutions Developer II (Front-End) at Leading EDJE, Inc.
“Learning from my mistakes over the decades, I feel that I have become a solid programmer.” —Me
The Impact of Testing on a DevOps Pipeline
CI/CD pipelines are an integral part of almost any organization today. “It works on my machine” is only valid in a few scenarios. Our code needs to get to other environments: Dev, QA, UAT, and Production. Testing is a recommended part of the pipeline process.
What is the impact of NOT having active testing in your pipeline processes? How do we get testing in place, and how does it affect an organization?
Cameron and Tracey Hughes
Cameron Hughes is a software/knowledge engineer. He has been intimately involved with the design, building, and deployment of all kinds of software systems from the amazingly simple to the surprisingly complex. He speaks fairly fluent Prolog and C++ within any Linux/Unix eco-system. The projects he is currently involved in focus on AIM (Alternative Intelligence for Machines) & AIR (Alternative Intelligence for Robots). He is a AIM/AIR researcher at Ctest Laboratories and a Software Epistemologist at Advanced Software Construction (ASC). Cameron is a Senior ACM fellow and a member of the Board of Directors for the National Robotics Education Foundation (NREF).
Tracey Hughes is a software/visualization engineer. As a visualization engineer, her expertise is not only communication of information and knowledge visually, but also includes graphics and user-interface programming. For many years, she has studied and created visualizations from tables, diagrams, to software and epistemic visualization. Epistemic visualization is a type of software visualization but also includes as aspects of information extraction. She primarily performs epistemic visualization on systems developed at Ctest Laboratories.
Robot Stories for Embedded Linux: Transparent Model-Driven AI Architectures
This talk presents ideas and programming techniques for providing transparent world models for hardware agents or robot systems that are built around Raspberry PI OS. This talk is intended for audiences that are interested in building autonomous systems that use Raspberry PI as the primary controllers of action. It is primarily targeted to audiences with a basic knowledge of Raspberry PI and a cursory knowledge of the Arduino.
In the current AI frenzied environment, the promise or any discussion of autonomous agents or autonomous robots is dominated by undecipherable Black Box AI, or LLMs, and Chatbots have a stranglehold on all things automated. As an alternative, we are presenting a no-nonsense, practical approach to building knowledge-based automation that is not only transparent but comprehensible to all concerned. We are convinced that programming hardware agents and robots with S.T.O.R.I.E.S is the most sensible and responsible approach to automation that has to be embedded in human-centric environments or systems. In this talk, we introduce a S.T.O.R.I.E.S architecture suitable for embedded Raspberry PI and Arduino systems.
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.
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.