LinuxTag
LinuxTag was an annual Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) conference and exposition with an emphasis on Linux but also BSD descendants located in Germany.
LinuxTag was the world's largest FLOSS conference and exhibition for years and aimed to provide a comprehensive overview of the Linux and Free Software market as well to promote contacts between users and developers.
LinuxTag offered these projects to promote their software and their concepts, and thus present themselves to the public in an appropriate manner, with their own booths, forums and lectures, free of charge.
The goal is to encourage projects to share concepts and content to the benefit of other groups and companies, and to provide forums for in-depth discussions of new technologies and opportunities.
The purpose of the association, according to its bylaws,[1] is "the promotion of Free Software", and is pursued primarily by organizing the LinuxTag events.
They wanted to inform the fellow students and the public about Linux and Open Source Software, which both were in their early stages at this time.
The first couple of LinuxTag events were held at the University of Kaiserslautern and organized under the auspices of its Unix-AG PG Linux.
[a] LinuxTag 1997/2[5] had a couple of hundred visitors and brought some firsts: Two tracks with talks running in parallel, occupying two days, tutorial sessions for acquiring a deeper understanding of a topic and a small exhibition at which Open Source Software projects presented their goals and achievements.
Due to the ".com" boom which also triggered many major players in the IT industry to embrace Open Source Software, the booths from companies filled a whole building of the university, among then Hewlett-Packard, IBM, SuSE etcetera.
Keynote speakers were Eric S. Raymond, Rob Malda of Slashdot and John "Maddog" Hall of Linux International.
[14][15] Along the admission ticket for € 10, visitors received the LinuxTag edition of the initial release of the Knoppix DVD and a Tux pin.
Other highlights included the release of OpenGroupware.org, OpenOffice.org, a conversion to run Linux of several dozen Xboxes, some by a hardware modification by two solder points, some by utilizing so-called MechInstallers.
There was also a Programming Competition and on Sunday, 13 July 2003 from 13 to 14 o'clock a world record attempt took place: On a server 100 Linux desktop sessions with Gnome and KDE were simultaneously running, which could be used by everyone on the Internet.
The free lecture program was opened on Friday by the Parliamentary State Secretary, Federal Ministry of Economics and Labour, Rezzo Schlauch.
As usual a conference with far more than 100 talks and presentations was accompanied by a large exhibition with booths from more than 160 companies and projects, plus on 22 June 2005 the business and administration sub-conference.
[22] This sparked a lively debate due to the political attitude of Wolfgang Schäuble in his administrative role, which triggered calls to boycott LinuxTag.
The second LinuxTag in the German capital was under the patronage of (then) German Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor Frank-Walter Steinmeier and was labelled as a part of a six-day "IT Week in the Capital Region", which also included the IT business trade fair IT Profits under the patronage of the Federal Minister of transport as a co-event to LinuxTag.
LinuxTag 2008 hosted as sub-conferences the second German Asterisk day, a user and developer conference for IP Telephony and the 8th @Kit Congress, on which legal issues of professional IT use are discussed.
[28] This 16th LinuxTag was attended by about 11,600 people and stood under the patronage of Cornelia Rogall-Grothe, Federal Government Commissioner for Information Technology.
Keynote speakers included Microsoft's general manager James Utzschneider who stunned the audience with his open approach to Open Source Software, the CEO of SugarCRM, Larry Augustin, who underlined the economic impact of FLOSS and its leverage in cloud computing, the "director of open source" at Google, Chris DiBona, who underlined the professional level of LinuxTag, the kernel developer Jonathan Corbet who gave an outlook on the next Linux kernel 2.6.35, and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth laid out the next milestones for the Ubuntu desktop distribution.
Keynotes were given by Wim Coekaerts (Oracle), Bradley Kuhn (Software Freedom Conservancy) and Daniel Walsh (Red Hat).
The 18th LinuxTag happened from 23 to 26 May 2012 at the Messe Berlin with the motto "Open minds create effective solutions",[30] another time under the patronage of Cornelia Rogall-Grothe of the German Federal Government Commissioner for Information Technology.
Keynotes were given by Jimmy Schulz, chairman of the project group "Interoperability, Standards and Open Source" of the commission for research on internet and digital society of the German Bundestag, Ulrich Drepper, maintainer of the GNU C standard library Glibc and Lars Knoll, employee at Nokia and chief maintainer of the QT library.
Keynotes were given by kernel developer Matthew Garrett on the subject of Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) and Secure Boot, and Benjamin Mako Hill, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who marked so-called anti-features as unacceptable, where manufacturers build usage restrictions into devices.
This decline in visitor numbers was interpreted as a side effect of the ubiquity of Free Software and Linux, hence not being of extraordinary interest any longer.
In order to adapt to the changes, the LinuxTag focused on the core issue of the professional use of Open Source Software, as in 2014.
