At the official opening of LinuxTag 2007 and the IT users? trade show IT Profits, Berlin's Mayor and Senator for Economics, Labour and Women's Affairs Harald Wolf announced that his administration's servers will change over to the free operating system Linux at the beginning of 2008. The Senator emphasised the traditionally open IT infrastructure of his department.
The IT strategy of the Land Berlin will also be expanded to incorporate the subjects of open standards and open source software. The economics administration has produced a "Common Strategy for Developing Berlin as an IT Location", which will define the main points in the work of economic promotion in Berlin at regular intervals. Wolf emphasised that open standards assist the regional IT industry in particular in its efforts to supply the market with highly efficient products. He continued by stating that politicians should not merely pay lip service to the need to deploy open standards and open source solutions.
This leading convention and trade show for Linux and free software in Europe opened on Wednesday and by Saturday its organisers, Messe Berlin and LinuxTag e. V., are expecting some 10,000 visitors to the Berlin exhibition halls.
About LinuxTag
LinuxTag is Europe's leading event for free software and Linux. Using the slogan "Where .com meets .org", each year thousands of users, other interested persons and experts in free and open source software meet with one another at this combined convention and trade show. This major four-day event brings together manufacturers, support personnel, software projects and communities from Germany and from all over Europe. LinuxTag Berlin is organised by Messe Berlin GmbH in association with LinuxTag e. V. The official sponsors of LinuxTag 2007 are IBM, Novell, Sun Microsystems and T-Systems.