Companies, Projects and Developers

One of the most popular booth's this year by far has to have been the Mozilla Foundation's manned by a number of high profile faces from Mozilla including European Communications Manager Dr. Barbara Huppe and Mozilla QA Team and software engineer Carsten Book. Mozilla was showing off its desktop Firefox web browser, Thunderbird email client and Firefox for Maemo, also known as "Fennec", on Nokia's N900 smartphone.

Mozilla QA Team member and software engineer Carsten Book showing off Firefox for Maemo. In addition to showing their popular browser and promoting the "Test Pilot" program that, via an add-on for Firefox, allows a user to try the newest features and enhancements for the browser before other users, the Mozilla team were also giving away buttons, stickers and, for a short time, Firefox lanyards. However, the Camino web browser for Mac OS X, the SeaMonkey "all-in-one internet application suite" and the calendar projects, were not mentioned or promoted.

A number of commercial open source companies were also represented at the show, such as Oracle, Univention and the open source customer relationship manager SugarCRM. The Linux Professional Institute (LPI) Central Europe was promoting the recent international partnership with Novell aimed at standardising their entry-level Linux certification programs and, in addition to offering several exam labs, gave a number of presentations on its Linux Professional Institute Certification (LPIC) program.

IBM was showing off its Novell Enterprise Linux Server. During the show, Zarafa, the company behind the Zarafa Collaboration Platform (ZCP), announced a new partnership with BluePex that will expand the collaboration platforms market share in Brazil, adding thousands of new Zarafa-based in-boxes. Zarafa is a Linux-based groupware product which offers its own WebAccess web client, IMAP/POP3 access, a CalDAV gateway and native MAPI integration with Outlook.

Other non-profit projects represented in the Open Source area of this year's CeBIT included the Perl programming language, the Debian project, OpenOffice.org and, for the first time, Open Source Berlin. The KDE Project was represented by developers from the KDE Desktop team, KOffice team and Amarok developer Sven Krohlas, who is currently working on integrating Free Music Charts into the popular open source music player for the KDE desktop. The final release of Amarok 2.3 is expected to arrive this week. Additionally, The H spoke with BIND 10 Programme Manager Shane Kerr about the next version of BIND, the most widely used Domain Name System (DNS) server on the Internet, with IPFire's Project Leader and Developer Michael Tremer on his open source firewall, and with Navit Project Leader Martin Schaller about the German district of Brandenburg running trials on the open source navigation system for its Police System.

The H found CeBIT 2010 an enjoyable and worthwhile event for an open source specialist, despite CeBIT's reputation as a trade show. Next year's CeBIT will take place from the 1st to the 5th of March, 2011.

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