Formerly regarded as technical gimmicks, open source programs have meanwhile become firmly established with companies and public institutions and provide an effective alternative to conventional software products. The trend towards open source systems will be very much in evidence at CeBIT 2009. For this reason, a dedicated area has been created in Hall 6.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is persisting in its worldwide battle against software patents with comprehensive background information and has hired lobbyist Ciaran O'Riordan to fight the next round.

The new OpenOffice 3.0.1 is the release of a portable, USB loadable version of OpenOffice.

The GNU Project's Bourne Again Shell (bash) is now in its fourth major version, which provides numerous enhancements.

Scheduled for release in October, Ubuntu 9.10, codenamed Karmic Koala will come with server cloud computing and a new desktop design.

The idea of an industry-wide common cryptography standard is certainly welcome. But self-interest usually precedes usability, so two industry consortiums are now vying over which standards to adopt, one on the side of Sun and the other leaning toward IBM/HP. Then there is an additional player in the Trusted Computing Group.

The coming March release of QT Jambi will probably be the last. QT Software will discontinue support for the Java version.

If Google were to use Qt, things would be much simpler and Chrome would have a unified interface under Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. But Google isn't satisfied with Qt.