Beth Lynn History

This is from an e-mail Beth Lynn sent to Moose on 1/23/12.

Yes. 10 years of OLF is our theme. I discussed with Phil at length my vision on what that means. Please let me try to summarize...

The Ohio LinuxFest has been as much as a follower in open source history as a participant

We grew from an interlug gathering of Ohio user groups and anyone else who would make the trek. Under the dream of Mike Meffie and Paul Ferris, we endeavored to have world-class speakers that would be available free-of-cost. From year one in 2003, we did just that. We had founders of LTSP Jim McQuinn and Scott Collins of Mozilla. To this day, the Ohio LinuxFest still offers free admission.

We have had many of firsts, to name a few: The first Linux on ppc64 via IBM 2004 The first Ubuntu talk in the USA at a conference, Jorge Castro, 2005 The first appearance of real life penguins at a North American conference, 2006 The first discounted LPI-one-day-cram and testing site opportunity, 2007 The first oral presentation of Dr. Peter Salus's book, "The Penguin, the GNU and the Daemon," 2008 The _only_ community 40-Years of UNIX celebration with Dr. Douglass McIroy, 2009 The first episode of season two of the Linux Link Tech Show, 2010 and Maddog's first prediction of what the next 20 years has in store for Free Culture in honor of the birth of the Linux kernel