Ohio LinuxFest 2007

The Ohio LinuxFest was a great event that took place two days ago in Columbus, Ohio, the largest conference and expo for Free and Open Source software professionals and enthusiasts in the area. Its sponsors were reputed companies in the Linux world, like Silicon Mechanics, Google, IBM, N2Net, ZenOSS, etc.

OHL started with a welcome reception that included some pizza and refreshments and during Friday a training program called OLFU took place. It included topics like LPI Cram, Anti-Spam, Documentation, Storage, etc. From 6 pm, a pre-party was scheduled, which gathered people from FARK.com and Linux Link Tech Show podcast.

The exposition was opened Saturday morning and all the participants received free coffee. After the keynote three tracks of discussions in the Silicon Mechanics, Google and Linux international balrooms took place.

An after-party at Hyatt Recency Columbus in the Union ballroom was started at 8 'o clock in the evening, sponsored by Google and Notacon. On Sunday afternoon there were two opportunities for LPI tests (level one, level two and Ubuntu), sold at a discount for the LinuxFest participants.

Max Spevack, Fedora Project leader focused on the effects Internet had on Free Software, telecommunications, finance, etc. He talked about how TurboGears offers freedom of choice in the SQL database and the development framework someone would choose for developing web applications. He also pointed out the rejection of DRM by the society from two points of view: philosophically and economically.

Roberto Sanchez, an official Debian maintainer explained how to package software for Debian and its derivatives, by explaining the directory structure of a Debian repository, covered the steps a maintainer should do to get started and used some screenshots to show how to build Debian packages.

Bradley Kuhn, from the Software Freedom Law Center covered some potentially difficult topics in law and licenses. He started with the history of Free Software and continued with explaining some aspects of the SCO case.

Don Parris had a Marketing FOSS presentation, which received some positive reviews but the presentation would've extended on a longer speaking time, if it had been allowed, for a better coverage of the articles.

Phil Robb from HP explained how to understand the risks of licensing and how to moderate them. One very important step in doing this is to know if the software you're planning to distribute is in compliance and compatible with its dependencies.

One of the most important figures that participated at this event was John Maddog Hall, who spoke about the One Laptop Per Child Project, presenting the need of information of the people in Third World countries, a need that the OLPC laptops can supply.