Ohio LinuxFest 2010

Christopher (Monty) Montgomery, Open Source multimedia advocate and developer of Ogg Vorbis, will be a keynote speaker at this year's Ohio LinuxFest.

Monty is the creator of the open-source audio format Ogg Vorbis. Ogg Vorbis, well known as a best-in-class codec, is widely used by artists, independent media, and game developers. His other popular FOSS packages include cdparanoia, a puzzle game or two, and wide ranging contributions to other media-related FOSS projects. His most recent work was on the next-generation Ogg video encoder named Thusnelda and he's now returned to audio development and a new audio codec tentatively named Ghost.

He is also the founder of the Xiph.Org Foundation which develops and advocates Open Source multimedia formats as industry standards. Xiph is the home of Ogg and several other projects, such as Speex, Flac, Celt, Theora, Icecast and XSPF.

Monty has spoken at a variety of conferences about Open Source and multimedia, including SCaLE, FOMS and OpenLibre, as well as presented at the Library of Congress, VON, and the Future of Music Policy Summit. He has recently been dragged into the IETF as well, joining several Xiph compatriots already knee-deep.

Monty holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a M.Eng. in Computer Engineering from the Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokodai). He is currently a Senior Engineer at the Open Source software vendor Red Hat where he works on open desktop media software. Most of his hobbies involve music or audio, and include restoring and playing vintage bassoons, singing in theatre, sound engineering, designing audio equipment, and collecting antique Singer sewing machines [known to make a pleasing sound].