LinuxTag history

The idea to LinuxTag has been born in 1995. At the university of Kaiserslautern there was - since the beginning of the 90s - a student working group, the  Unix-AG, which concerned itself with modern and innovative networked systems. Linux has been in use there since 1992. Two members of the working group, Michael Kleinhenz and Nils Magnus, decided that it was due to present Linux also to a wider audience. To achieve this, they wanted to offer a public presention at the university. On Jan, 20th 1996, this became reality: with the help of many volunteers the first LinuxTag took place in the foyer of the university's Audimax. The event consisted of 6 talks and presentations and was visited by 70 people.

Encouraged by the success of this first event, the second LinuxTag took place nearly excatly one year later, on Jan 15th, 1997. Even though the number of visitors nearly doubled to about 150, the event suffered from a massive freezing rain, which disabled large areas of the public transport in Kaiserslautern. As a consequence of this, the team decided to arrange a second LinuxTag in that year. Since then, LinuxTag always takes place during summer.

LinuxTag 97/2 still took place in the Audimax' foyer in building 42 and has been visited by several hundred visitors. Besides the talks, which have then already been held in two parallel tracks, several tutorials have been offered, which provided a more in-depth introdution to several topics. Another innovation should change the appearance of LinuxTag: while before there had only been talks and presentations, now in addition to that several local projects presented their works.

In 1998 for the first time there also were external projects presenting themselves at LinuxTag. Among the first of them was the KDE project. In this year, LinuxTag had around 3000 visitors.

The fifth LinuxTag in June 1999 experienced a real boom: the foyer was not large enough anymore and the university's cafeteria had to be cleared of its furniture to accomondate all 55 exhibitors. During the event, HP had shown a first simulator for the upcoming 64Bit Linux version. The number of exhibitors had grown considerably and the number of visitors reached with more than 7.000 people a magnitude comparable to the total number of students at Kaiserslautern university. As this magnitude of visitors became a problem to the University administration in terms of available infrastructure, LinuxTag had to search for a new appropriate location.

The newly founded LinuxTag e.V. decided to move the event to the Stuttgart Exhibition Centre. In the "boom year" 2000, LinuxTag has been virtually overrun with visitors. As both the large numbers of visitors as well as the summerly heat wave during July 2000 caused extremely high temperatures in the exhibition halls, this LinuxTag is well-remembered by many visitors as the "Open-Source Sauna". The event had grown to four days in the meantime and had reached a significant share of international visitors; the "Userfriendly"-cartoonist Illiad and the "Slashdot"-founder Cmdr. Taco gave well-observed talks. The keynote of the Free-Software-visionary Richard M. Stallman alone was attended by nearly 2000 visitors.

LinuxTag 2001 was mostly unaffected by the slowly upcoming Crash-mood in the IT business and has shown new records in terms of exhibition space and number of visitors, which largely exceeded the mark of 10.000 people.

This year's keynote was held by Eric S. Raymond, who has shaped the expression "Open Source" and the associated movement.

Another relocation was due in 2002: the Karlsruhe Exhibition and Congress Centre offered an optimal combination of halls and rooms at a reasonable price. Since then LinuxTag takes place there. The conference had grown to about 60 talks and presentations and the keynote had been held by Matthias "Kalle" Dalheimer.

In 2003 LinuxTag had 19.500 visitors and 130 exhibitors. The keynote was held by Jon "Maddog" Hall. LinuxTag 2004 took place fron Juni 23rd to 26th, with 16.175 visitors and 150 exhibitors. The keynote was held by Ian Murdock, the founder of the Debian-Project.

An overview of previous LinuxTag events