Berlin, 14 May 2011 – From 11 to 14 May more than 11,582 visitors came to the Berlin Exhibition Grounds to witness the biggest industry meeting place of its kind, in order to find out about Linux and Open Source and to exchange views. At over 260 events, held simultaneously in up to ten rooms, 77 independent projects and 43 commercial exhibitors, plus numerous speakers, some of whom delivered major keynotes, demonstrated their solutions and ideas, marking a new record for this conference. “LinuxTag proved that electronic media are no substitute for face-to-face meetings“, is how Nils Magnus, LinuxTag e.V.’s officer responsible for coordinating the event, summarized his impression of the fair. “Contacting individual developers or companies is easy. However, only an international trade fair and conference such as LinuxTag provides an opportunity to get to know a whole team from several countries. This is where head developers, testers, community managers and entrepreneurs come into direct contact with one another.”
Thus 15 members of the LVM Linux kernel Device Mapper team from six countries met in Berlin to discuss improvements to storage solutions. Companies use the Device Mapper to organize hard drives and storage systems, which is particularly relevant in cloud and virtualization solutions. Alasdair Kergon, LVM project manager who works with Red Hat: “We chose LinuxTag for our annual meeting because it is where we can meet lots of expert developers and visitors. On top of that we always enjoy coming back to this fascinating city.”
Jens Heithecker, the fair’s director at Messe Berlin: “This edition of LinuxTag has shown that the presence, side by side, of independent projects and commercial exhibitors in a Linux and Open Source environment stimulates long-term developments within the community, particularly at international level. In addition to the long-standing Business & Public Sector Authorities Conference, our new concepts, Security Day and Academy Day, which took place today, met with a very positive response. Their successful debut means that these two events will be on the LinuxTag agenda in 2012. I understand the atmosphere in the audience at the tenth Hacking Contest was rather like at a Champions League final.“
LinuxTag project manager Petra Kuhfuß emphasized the outstanding atmosphere at this industry gathering: “The mood was excellent and the quality of meetings was very good. For us as organizers the noise level at the fair gives us the clearest possible indication of its success, and this year the volume was particularly high. That puts a smile on the faces of everyone in the Linux community.”
Today at LinuxTag, Freie Software und Bildung e.V. and LPI e.V. signed an agreement sealing long-term collaboration with schools, professional schools and universities. They will begin working together immediately in order to ensure even greater success in accomplishing their joint aims and in order to establish Linux and Open Source even more firmly within the German educational system.
Taking as their slogan “Open Minds in science, industry and society“, LinuxTag and Lisog e.V. invited visitors to attend the first Open Mind Manager Morning. On 13 May, in the big conference hall at Messe Berlin, under the heading of “Smart minds – intelligent solutions“, a general debate took place on the importance, now and in the future, of the transparency of IT structures. Prof. Dr. Gunter Dueck, CTO IBM, held a lively and practically oriented introductory speech, focusing on education, which later sparked considerable discussion among the audience of invited guests. This series of talks is set to continue in autumn.
The 18th edition of LinuxTag will be taking place on the Berlin Exhibition Grounds from 23 to 26 May 2012.
Comments from exhibitors
Nina Häring, tarent AG
“For tarent LinuxTag is a very special event every year. We look forward to meeting old friends from the open source community, prospective new employees, and to establish new partnerships. LinuxTag provides a very good opportunity for making initial contact, the atmosphere is relaxed and the mood was excellent this year as well. As an IT company working with open source this gathering of the community is a very important aspect of our work, as we profit daily from open source. We would like to thank all the open source projects involved, the business partners and the interesting people we met for the exciting time we had at LinuxTag 2011.“
Dr. Karl-Heinz Strassemeyer, CEO, Linux Solutions Group e.V.
“At the first Lisog LIVE Koop event at LinuxTag we were able to very successfully realize our concept entitled ’Together we are strong’, with 17 exhibitors and 47 lectures. I believe that together with LinuxTag e.V. and Messe Berlin we represent an outstanding platform, which every year brings our association with its aim of open-mindedly shaping the future rather than holding on to the past a step closer to reaching its goal.“
Silvia Frank and Cord Martens, Univention GmbH
“Once again, this year’s LinuxTag provided open source developers and trade visitors with an outstanding, quality programme of papers. For us as exhibitors LinuxTag was an all-round success, thanks to many good meetings with visitors from businesses and the general public. For us at LinuxTag, being able to exchange open source know-how among professionals is important for our open source development, which is tied in with the community and technology partners.“
Manfred Schlutz, Thomas-Krenn.AG
“For us LinuxTag is the ideal place to meet the open source community. This is the second time we are at the fair in Berlin and we are satisfied with how it has worked out. At LinuxTag the mixture of people from the community and from business is very good. With our software we promote open source projects in an effort to spread awareness of open source in people’s minds.”
Matthias Albert, head of Systems Engineering / IT Operations inovex GmbH
For us LinuxTag is an absolute must, as it gives us an opportunity to maintain direct contact with the open source community and with open source projects. Once again there were some outstanding papers, particularly on innovations from individual projects. We were able to demonstrate inovex and in particular our systems engineering to visitors on our stand, which also gave a boost to our recruiting efforts.
Holger Dyroff, vice president, Business Development, Suse
“For us it was important to present Suse as an independent business unit at LinuxTag. The reactions among users, customers and our business partners were very positive. In that respect LinuxTag is the perfect platform.”
Alexander Oelling, founder, Business Development, sones GmbH
“For us as an innovative open source company, LinuxTag is an excellent opportunity to meet with other exhibitors and technically minded visitors interested in open source.”
Christian Zier, Federal Agency for Security and Information Technology (BSI)
“We were very satisfied with events at LinuxTag. The visitors on our stand expressed keen interest and we had lots of inquiries about the open source projects of the BSI.”
About LinuxTag
LinuxTag is Europe's leading trade fair and conference on Linux and open source software. The four-day event has been taking place since 1996, and annually on the Berlin Exhibition Grounds since 2007. It offers the latest information for professional users, decision-makers, developers, beginners and the community. In addition to the programme of papers and a separate Business & Public Sector Authorities Conference, LinuxTag traditionally includes an exhibition featuring projects and companies associated with the Open Source sector. Verein LinuxTag e.V. is the non-commercial organizer of the event, which is staged jointly with Messe Berlin GmbH. More information is available at www.linuxtag.org.