History

2003 – For the first time Bulgaria is hosting an international free / open source forum. OpenFest 2003 events take place in Sofia, Varna, Plovdiv, Stara Zagora, Chepelare, and also in Ocean City (USA) and the Sherbrooke (Quebec, Canada) with the conference Linux Festival.

2004 – The conference takes place on two consecutive days in the large halls of the specialized convention center Inter Expo Center in Sofia. For the first time within the forum consists BSDcon – a conference for the fans of the *BSD operating systems. This year OpenFest is attended by more than 1,000 registered visitors. All presentations are streaming live online with video and sound.

2005 – OpenFest features the largest number of regional events held in 7 Bulgarian cities: Dobrich, Ruse, Pazardzhik, Veliko Tarnovo, Plovdiv, Sliven and Sofia. The emphasis is on the economics of free software and the business models based on it, as well as on current software projects. Besides the BSDcon conference, OpenFest presents something new: OpenArt studio.

2006 – The lectures on OpenFest are already separated in three parallel streams: OpenTech technologies, OpenBiz for the business aspects of free software and OpenArt for the free art. The participation of foreign lecturers gets stronger. The key foreign guest presenter of the festival is Brandon Robinson, leader of the Debian Project 2005 and one of the developers with the largest contribution to the development of the distribution.

2007 – The festival celebrates its 5th anniversary with 5 international guest speakers with representatives of Electronic Frontier Foundation Europe and Free Software Foundation Europe among them. The unique photographic project Simple Studio makes its debut at OpenFest – its aim is to to give budding photographers and artists free access to professional equipment and skilled team. Besides the already established as a tradition BSDcon, examinations for certification to the Linux Professional Institute are also hold in the halls of the Military Club in Sofia.

2008 – The PrivacyCamp session caused a furor at the sixth edition of OpenFest. The talk about privacy on the Internet combines a visually attractive presentation and a heated discussion on global network security, monitoring of personal communications online and the scope of human rights. In the technical sessions of the conference highlights fell on Samba4, highly sustainable Heartbeat2-based systems, and virtualization with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

2009 – The seventh edition of OpenFest presents two parallel panels with hot presentations and philosophical topics for programmers as “The Happy Programmer 2.0” and “Software Craftsmanship”. The business concepts for making money from open source are being discussed, some talks about Rails and Flex, a separate BSD flow and several Mozilla-related subjects.

2010 – While in its eight year OpenFest still manages to maintain its innovative spirit with themes covering NoSQL databases and MongoDB, sharing some business thoughts on open source practices in proprietary projects, maintenance and services for them. Interesting is the participation of Microsoft with “Open Microsoft”, followed by an open alternative to Microsoft Exchange, led to the introduction of Linux in the public administration.

2011 – The program of the 9th OpenFest is very strong with sessions taking place simultaneously in two rooms. But this is not enough: a BSD certification exam, LPI exams, a crimping competition, some interactive jokes for sysadmins and an inspirational lightning talks session. The conference features also a detailed examination of JavaScript, CoffeeScript and NodeJS, along with Backbone.js. Some more thoughts and shared experience with the business around open source products – just in time for the growing interest in the Arduino. And also – free hardware and the homemade supercomputer.

2012-2018 – With every year that passes the conference has been growing, and it has reached the status of the biggest open-source event on the Balkans, being held in Sofia Tech Park, with an average of 3000 visitors per year.