Vice-chancellor and Foreign Minister of Germany Frank-Walter Steinmeier is the new patron of the Open Source conference Linuxtag, the organisation announced last week. The conference takes place in Berlin at the end of May.
"Steinmeier's support for Open Source and Linux shows the importance of this technology for Germany's innovation and for the competitiveness of German and European industry", the organisation said in a statement. The Foreign Minister is taking over the patronage from Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany's minister of the Interior.
Germany's Foreign Ministry is a know advocate of Open Source, explains the organisation. Thanks to its use of Open Source, the Foreign Ministry by far has the lowest IT costs of all German ministries, they write. "Its IT-strategy is a major contribution to Germany's innovation."
The Foreign Ministry is actively involved in Open Source. The ministry for example uses Open Source software to secure the connections to its offices abroad, uses encryption software for some of its laptops, and is on some laptops using OpenOffice. Last November Steinmeier addressed a workshop at the ministry on the use of the ISO-approved Open Document Format (ODF).
Exhibits
The Open Source exhibition takes place from 28 to 31 May at Berlin's Conference centre 'Messezentrum unter dem Funkturm'. It is the second consecutive year the conference is organised in Berlin. Last year the meeting attracted 9600 visitors, according to the organisation.
One of this year's key note addresses is by Ian Murdock, vice president of Developer and Community Marketing at Sun Microsystems and founder of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. Other key note speakers are Nat Friedman, one of the core developers of the Gnome Open Source desktop environment and David Miller, a Linux kernel developer known for his work on the networking stack.
Meanwhile, the organisers of the Linux Park at the German IT trade fair Cebit this week announced they will widen their event to cover all of Open Source, starting with next years' Cebit in Hannover. After eight years the Linux Park at Cebit gets a new name, Open Source Cebit. "Open Source is becoming more and more important in the overall planning of Cebit", organiser Rosemarie Schuster told the German Linux Magazine.
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Open Source Cebit (in German)