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Wizards of OS

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Wizards of OS (WOS) is a Berlin-based conference.

Its topics are the cultural and political potentials of free software, software technology, digital networks and media, and more generally information freedom and open cooperation in the creation and proliferation of knowledge. The conference is interdisciplinary and aims to be a platform of exchange between, chiefly, scientists, engineers, social researchers, scholars from the humanities, artists and activists.

The name is a word play on Wizard of Oz. The acronym OS stands for operating system, not for open source.

WOS3

The first Wizards of OS conference took place in 1999, the third conference in 2004 had the topic "The Future of the Digital Commons" and featured, among others, the launch of the German translation of the Creative Commons licenses.

See also: List of speakers at Wizards of OS

OpenBSD

For OpenBSD 3.7, released May 19th, 2005, a theme song was made also titled "The Wizard of OS", the song chronicled the OpenBSD developers' struggle to obtain open documentation for wireless cards and how manufacturers in Taiwan like Ralink and Realtek were the most cooperative of all the companies contacted.