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OSDC 2008 Keynote Speakers

We have the following exceptional keynote speaker lineup confirmed for this year's conference:

• Andrew Tridgell
• Anthony Baxter
• Chris DiBona
• Larry Wall
• Pia Waugh

Andrew Tridgell

Founder, Samba Team

Andrew Tridgell has been developing free and open source software for nearly 20 years.

He holds a PhD in computer science from the Australian National University and is an active developer for a number of well known free software projects, including the Samba project.

Anthony Baxter

Google/Python Software Foundation

Anthony has been involved in the open-source community for more than a decade, largely working in Python and, in the last few years, on Python. He’s worked in the Internet area and in the telco space, where he gets to exercise his incredibly short attention span by working on far far too many things at once. He’s written or contributed to more open source projects than he can remember – mostly related to networking and protocol implementations.

He’s currently the release manager for Python. This is much less glamorous than you might think. After a number of years working for a travel-based telephone company, he’s recently started working for Google Australia.

Anthony’s spoken at a number of conferences, including a keynote at linux.conf.au 2008, at each of the 4 OSDC conferences held so far, and OSCON 2005 and 2008.

Chris DiBona

Open Source Programs Manager, Google

Chris DiBona is the open source programs manager at Mountain View, Ca. based Google where his team oversees license compliance and supports the open source developer community through programs such as the Google Summer of Code and through the release of open source software projects and patches.

Mr. DiBona is an internationally known advocate of open source software and related methodologies. He occasionally appears on the This Week in Tech and Cranky Geeks podcasts. He is a visiting scholar at the MIT Sloan School of Management and has a masters in software engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. Additionally, he serves on the advisory board of imeem, a San Francisco, Ca. based social networking firm.

Before joining Google, Mr. DiBona was an editor and author for the website Slashdot.org . Additionally, he coedited the award-winning essay compilations "Open Sources" and "Open Sources 2.0" and writes for several publications. He was the host of Floss Weekly with Leo Laporte and made a number of appearances on TechTV's "The Screensavers"

Larry Wall

Perl Benevolent Dictator for Life

Larry is the developer of the Perl programming language. He is also known as the original author of the rn Usenet software, and the nearly universally used patch. He has won the IOCCC twice, and was the recipient of the first Free Software Foundations award for the Advancement of Free Software in 1998.

Beyond his technical skills, Larry is known for his wit and often ironic sense of humor which he displays in the comments to his source code or on Usenet (e.g. "We all agree on the necessity of compromise. We just can't agree on when it's necessary to compromise")

Larry Wall is a trained linguist, which helped him with his book writing, as well as with the design of Perl. He is the co-author of Programming Perl (often referred to as the Camel Book), which is the definitive resource for Perl programmers. He has also edited the Perl Cookbook.

Larry continues to oversee further development of Perl and serves as the Benevolent Dictator for Life of the Perl project.

Pia Waugh

Consultant, Waugh Partners

Pia Waugh is a consultant at Waugh Partners in Sydney, Australia. She had worked as a Research Coordinator for the Australian Service for Knowledge on Open Source Software (ASK-OSS), the Open Source strategist for a large systems integrator and still works to develop the Australian FOSS industry and improve Government policies towards FOSS. She has been working with Free & Open Source Software (FOSS) such as Linux for about 8 years. She has seen FOSS deliver not only economic benefits to countries and business all around the world, but significant social and environmental benefits to communities everywhere.

Pia is a community leader both in Australia and internationally as a founding member and Director of OLPC Australia and President of Software Freedom International. She was also the President (then VP) of Linux Australia, and on the linux.conf.au 2007 organising team. She has spoken at Software Livre in Brazil, FOSS events in China, the Open Source World Conferences in Spain, the World Summit of Information Society (United Nations) in Switzerland, linux.conf.au in New Zealand and linux.conf.au, education au, Making Links, various TechGirls events and many more in Australia! She is passionate about improving the world by getting great technologies to people who need them, and creating a well-connected global society where anyone can play and succeed.