How we hacked the Bavarian State with an Open Source Open Letter (glt26)

How we hacked the Bavarian State with an Open Source Open Letter (glt26)

Author: CCC media team April 11, 2026 Duration: 30:53
None In September, a few of us Open Source nerds heard that the Bavarian government wanted to "sneakily" "invest" another billion Euro in Microsoft Cloud, Teams and 365 – without a tender, and before the year ends (Base contract) I talked to friends, and we created an open letter. Soon we were like ten initiators. We found support among many Bavarian Open Source companies and NGOs, only weeks later > 160 companies and institutions had been signing the letter. When larger German NGOs like the Gesellschaft für Informatik (Society for Informatics) and the Bund der Steuerzahler (Tax Payers' Association joined, the Bavarian Government could not stay silent any more. Leading up of today, two secretaries and the minister president have engaged in a public blame game. At first they were angry about the unwanted, additional publicity - and publicly said so. The goal of sneakily accomplishing the deal until end of 2025 failed and it is still not finalized. But now - four weeks before an election, secretaries of state for digital and finance are fighting publicly, accusing each other of "fake news" and are saying silly things. On camera - and in parliament. "OSS is too expensive" or "We needed something federated, decentralized and secure, thus we had to go for MS 365" and similar. It's fun. What we can learn from this? PR for OSS works, timing is helpful, topics are important and claims like "ONE BILLION!!" are valuable. No one knew Trump, Greenland and Davos would come to help us, but they did and made it hard for the conservative Bavarian government to keep doing what they had always been. And we were a bunch of people that stuck it out. And it's so important that we the OSS community learn how to play against the lobbys. We need to apply the "divide and conquer" strategy against the real enemies, not internally. Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ about this event: https://pretalx.linuxtage.at/glt26/talk/7AC7RK/

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Author: Episodes: 100

Chaos Computer Club - recent events feed
Podcast Episodes
Using Nix without the Nix: a Retrospective on Zilch (lixcon2026) [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 24:51
It's been a while since I last talked about Zilch; and now with Lix's existence, it's time to take another look; what's the status of this mysterious project, and what lessons can we learn from it? Licensed to the public…
Nix and buck2: from enemies to lovers with snowydeer (lixcon2026) [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 25:29
Nix does dependencies and distribution well, but has a controlling personality: it wants to build everything in the build graph. Buck2 delivers fast, user-friendly, and scalable project builds, but has an equally control…
Regiux: prototyping a fast Nix interpreter (lixcon2026) [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 30:51
The Nix expression language is challenging to evaluate due to non-strict semantics, dynamic scoping, a diverse collection of builtin operators, and tight integration with the Nix store. We give a progress report on Regiu…
The politics of language design (lixcon2026) [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 38:06
This talk is about Elpe, a mixture of ideas from Nix, Docker and Ubuntu/Debian/RHEL, with a strong focus on performance and security. I'll talk about the design choices I've made, and demo the thing and about how choices…
The untapped potential of Lix plugins (lixcon2026) [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 21:14
Lix plugins — a feature so esoteric none yet remember their existence. What power could they hold? What secrets could they unlock? Let's discover together! Licensed to the public under http://creativecommons.org/licenses…
Botanix: A Nix native CI in a forge-agnostic world (lixcon2026) [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 16:41
Botanix is a new CI software that targets a native nix integration as it builds derivations as its pipeline. It integrates natively with both Gerrit and Forgejo currently but its genericity allows for even more diversity…
Introduction to LixCon (lixcon2026) [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 7:39
Welcome to LixCon! Licensed to the public under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 about this event: https://pretalx.dgnum.eu/lixcon-2026/talk/38JNUB/
Privacy at the Code Level (glt26) [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 41:53
None **So you're familiar with secure coding practices, and you've taken steps to secure your devices and protect your personal privacy. But what about the privacy leaks in your code?** ___ In this talk, we'll take a whi…