For over a quarter of a century, the Chemnitzer Linux-Days have been working their way up to become one of the most important German open source and community conferences. In 2024, there were once again numerous talks, tracks and discussions, and grommunio was there.
After two virtual years, more than three hundred Linux nerds and professionals met again in mid-March at the Technical University of the former Karl-Marx-Stadt to discuss topics from the world of free software in five tracks. All presentations were recorded and are available as videos here.
On site from grommunio were developer Jan Engelhardt and Markus Feilner – the open source ambassador moderated an entire track on Sunday, with presentations on Sovereign Cloud Stack, the Prototype Fund, the Computerkiste and a PostgreSQL high availability.
But the blue logo could also be seen in many places in the exhibition area and aside from the presentations: At the Linux Professional Institute, there were T-shirts and matching flyers with combined graphics of grommunio and the colorful rockhopper penguin of the Upgrade-To-Linux project. grommunio is one of the sponsors of the LPI initiative.
In discussions with the server specialists at Thomas Krenn and the Linux experts at B1 Systems, it quickly became clear that Jan Engelhardt’s FOSDEM presentation “Implementing 27 MS Exchange Protocols in Open Source” had caused quite a stir in the open source groupware scene and the Linux world in particular. The need is great, many admins are worried, want or need to move away from Exchange and are looking for alternatives. At the Chemnitzer Linux-Days, conversations about ongoing tests and questions about the protocols from Redmond that grommunio implements, from Active Sync to IMAP and on to EWS and MS Graph, were a recurring theme.
The organizers are also confident: The Chemnitzer Linux-Days 2024 were a complete success, and the next date has already been set: March 22 and 23, 2025. Then the City will be “European Capital of Culture”, so it’s probably worth planning another, long weekend in Saxony.