IDABC(Interoperable Delivery of European eGovernment Services to public Administrations, Businesses and Citizens) has published a news on the use of open source at the german air traffic control, as was presented at the Open Source Meets Business conference in Nurnberg.

Impetus for looking at open source was the fact that some proprietary software used was not supported anymore, or running on hardware not being made anymore. This situation was not acceptable in highly regulated environment, needed 99.9% availability. Currently there are already 1030 applications running on GNU/Linux systems. The switch was made from Unix systems, which eased porting applications.

Since Saturday, a new anti-hacking law is applied in Germany, after being approved in may. Because its language is not very clear, it could be interpreted as criminalising the development, distribution or even downloads of "hacking tools" designed to circumvent eg data protection.