CeBIT 2012: Open source and Linux

Open source and Linux will, for the fourth year in a row, have a presence at this year's CeBIT trade show. Free and open source software (FOSS) projects and organisations from around the world will be represented in Hall 2 at the upcoming event, taking place next week from 6 to 10 March on the world's largest fairground in Hanover, Germany. Open Source CeBIT 2012 is organised into three areas: the Open Source Park, the Open Source Project Lounge and the Open Source Forum.

The Open Source Park will include various commercial vendors of free software solutions such as Drupal, the Eclipse Foundation and EclipseSource, OpenERP and the Open Source Business Alliance. Messaging and collaboration specialist Zarafa is planning to demonstrate its next generation WebApp web interface, first previewed at its 2011 SummerCamp event, and Alfresco is expected to show off version 4 of its Enterprise content management system (CMS). Nexenta, best known for the Nexenta Core Platform (NCP), will be discussing data corruption and the benefits of the ZFS filesystem, while Univention will have version 3 of its Corporate Server 3 and its Active Directory functionality and management tools on display.

The H's associates from heise Germany, including c't and iX magazines, will be among those represented As in previous years, the Open Source Project Lounge will play host to a number of non-commercial projects. Prior to CeBIT, these projects applied for free booth space at the event, providing them with an opportunity to present their work to the public. The KDE project, Foswiki, FusionDirectory, Fritz Fun (ffgtk), which is a project for controlling FRITZ!Box or compatible routers with Linux, and OpenGnSys will be among the project's represented by members of their respective communities. Other projects planning to attend include Horde (groupware), Python, opneATTIC (storage management), Uranos (automated Linux/Windows installation) and members of the Ubuntu community.

The Open Source Forum will include keynotes and presentations from various organisations and members of the open source community. Planned speakers include Jon "maddog" Hall, Knoppix creator Klaus Knopper, who will be presenting version 7.0 of his Linux distribution, Univention's Peter Ganten, Florian Effenberger from The Document Foundation, the non-profit organisation behind the open source LibreOffice office suite, and Daniel Molkentin from Nokia / the Qt Project. A full schedule, in German, is available from Linux Magazine. Each of the talks will be available as part of a live stream from CeBIT and later in an online archive.

CeBIT 2012 will take place at the Messe fairground complex in Hannover, Germany CeBIT is an acronym for "Centrum der Büro- und Informationstechnik", which means "Centre of Office and Information technology", and has been held each spring since 1986. The trade fair is described as "digital industry's biggest, most international event" and will showcase the latest in information technology (IT) products and solutions from thousands of companies from all around the globe.

If you are attending this year's CeBIT and would like to talk to The H, just tweet using the #TheHCeBIT hash tag on Twitter or send us an email at [email protected]. To keep up with The H, you can subscribe to one of the RSS feeds, or follow @honlinenews on Twitter. You can also follow The H's own tweeting on Twitter as @honline.

See also:

• Open Source at CeBIT 2011, a feature from The H.
• Happenings: FOSS at CeBIT 2010, a feature from The H.

(crve)