In March (3-8, 2009), CeBIT will once again be opening its gates in Hannover, Germany. The world's largest and most renowned trade fair for the world of IT and telecommunications will be featuring Open Source topics in hall 6. The CeBIT Open Source Forum 2009 will be the venue of daily lectures on the use of Linux and free software - and you can watch them online, live and for free!

The Debian project is happy to announce that it will again be represented at the CeBIT IT fair in Hanover, Germany, this year. At the booth of Univention GmbH in hall 2 stand B36, members of the project will be available for questions and discussions and will give a preview of the new version Debian 6.0 Squeeze.

The strong growth of open source in IT will be demonstrated with its prominent placement at the world's largest computer event, CeBIT 2010.

The consolidated IT of the city of Munich is reporting at CeBIT 2010 on converting their workstations to Linux and OpenOffice. The migration to the free office package was finalized for Munich. All 15,000 office PCs of the city council will work on OpenOffice, under Linux or Windows.

Many new technologies are ready to make a big impact this year. Some of them will be brand new, but many have been gestating and are now ready to hatch. If there is any theme here it is the mobile Web.

Linpus Technologies release Linpus Lite version 1.3, a Linux distribution aimed specifically at OEMs of low cost hardware

The forthcoming standard for the object-oriented language C++ will not be released before 2010. It will also lack the planned 'concepts' mechanism. This is according to information in a Dr. Dobbs Journal article by C++'s inventor, Bjarne Stroustrup. Concepts have been "decoupled" – or in Stroustrup's words "yanked out" – by the ISO group responsible for the standard, Working Group 21.

Larry the Free Software Guy would never let 2010 pass without a several timely forecasts. While this year lacks last year's inspiration, it would never stop him from making predictions like "2010 will absolutely, positively, without a doubt be the year of the Linux deskt . . . oh, never mind," and nine more.

In the old "pre 2000" day, the objective of most technology companies when they applied for patent protection was to ensure that their products and technologies were not copied by their competitors. The idea was that thanks to the patents you enjoyed about 20 years of exclusive use of your technology, after which everyone was free to use it because by then it was considered obvious.