Look forward to ye olde uncle Lennart's old-timey sales pitch.
I'm gonna summarize the Varlink talk: DBus is, and I quote, "very very very complex" and his system with JSON for low-level IPC is, in fact, the best thing since sliced bread and has no significant flaws. It works basically just like HTTP so the web people will love it. Kernel support for more great shit pending! I'm not sure where the hardon for a new IPC system with lernel (keeping that typo) support is from, but he's been trying for 15 years now. AFAICT, the service discovery problem could be solved by a user space service without much trouble. I mean if the whole thing wasn't an exercise in bad technological taste.
Varlink is based on much more conventional UNIX technology than Dbus, which is decades old: You connect to a named UNIX socket through its socket file in the filesystem (man page: unix(7)).
This is an old mechanism and it is known to work well. It does not require a broker service, it works right at system startup, and it does not require a working user database for permission checks (which would be a circular dependency for systemd in some configurations). If at all, I am surprised that systemd didn't use that earlier.
The main thing that Varlink standardizes on top of that is a JSON-based serialization format for a series of request/response pairs. But that seems like a lightweight addition.
It also does not require kernel support to work, the kernel support is already there. He mentioned in the talk that he'd like to be able to "tag" UNIX sockets that speak varlink as such, with kernel support. But that is not a prerequisite to use this at all. The service discovery -- and he said that in the talk as well -- is simply done by listing socket files in the file system, and by having a convention for where they are created.
I do not share your view of old timey sales pitch, at least for the talk about systemd nspawn OCI container support.
If anything, that talk was a tad low effort, with even dismissive answers — "Yes" and "No?" as full answers to audience questions, with no follow up?! Still very informative though!
The Varlink talk really was very salesy for a Fosdem presentation. Shouldn't be long until the recording becomes available, feel free to tell me I was wrong after watching it.
It's mainly re-hashed. I think I've seen the same talk twice before? At least once.
It's a very "I've made a cool thing. This is what I think is cool about it" type of talk. Which I don't think is uncommon for FOSDEM.
Maybe a bit uncommon for a higher profile figure like Lennart.
> It's mainly re-hashed. I think I've seen the same talk twice before? At least once.
He held a similar talk at All Systems Go I think (I missed the talk here at FOSDEM).
> It's a very "I've made a cool thing. This is what I think is cool about it" type of talk.
Varlink isn't something he just made up, he mearly "adopted it" (started making use of it). It existed before, but I don't know anything that really made use of it before.
The official-looking website at https://varlink.org doesn't give any information about who the authors are, as far as I can tell, but the screenshots show the username "kay". There's a git repo for libvarlink [1] where the first commits (from 2017) are by Kay Sievers, who is one of the systemd developers.
An announcement post [2] from later in 2017, by Harald Hoyer, says that the varlink protocol was created by Kay Sievers and Lars Karlitski in "our team", presumably referring to the systemd team.
So the systemd developers "adopted" their own thing from themselves?
While I guess you aren't wrong, I also wouldn't say you are entirely correct that Kay is a systemd developer. He use to work on udev, but hasn't been active in any meaningful way on it for 2 years before varlinks release[1]. For what it was made I can't really say, but Lennart hadn't start integrating Varlink until a while after its release (I think I remember it being like 2021 or so when he started making use of it, after another check it seems the start of varlink stuff in systemd was 2019[2]).
Kay Sievers' Wikipedia page cites a blog post by Lennart Poettering [1] which says that systemd was designed in "close cooperation" with Kay Sievers and that Harald Hoyer was also involved, so it seems pretty clear that he's on the team that develops systemd, the team that Harald Hoyer referred to as "our team". All three of them gave a talk [2] together in 2013 about what they were developing.
If Lennart Poettering "adopted" varlink, he seems to have done so from members of his own team ("our team") who created varlink and who are also fellow co-creators of systemd.
The FOSDEM speakers are sent emails to review and approve the video recording (this involves rudimentary stuff like reviewing the start and end time, if the automated system didn't get it right; choosing one of the three audio channels etc). The recordings that have been reviewed and approved would be online by now.
Hehe, I'm eagerly waiting for this one as well as I'd be extremely happy to replace some hack to run docker images with `systemd-nspawn` served from the nix store.
What saddens me a lot is that a lot of talks become low level beginner introduction fast food talks.
I think that it was better when most talks were 45 mins to 1h with deeper more advanced and senior content.
At the same time, with the overcrowded aspect, it becomes harder to socialize and meet people really involved in maintaining open source projects in my opinion. There are a lot lot lot more "users" on both sides (visitors and speakers) than what it used to be 10 years ago.
As an example, in a majority of talks there was no time for questions and very little chatter between and around talks. It is like walking in big city, everyone is busy running around.
And questions and comments after talks was what was bringing the most value to the event. Compared to just watch a recording of a talk.
OTOH, 80% of the reason I go to talks is to see if the person has interesting things to say and grab them after the talk for a chat.
I.e. it sucks for the remote experience, but I think for on-site it's fine to just talk more.
Gets harder if you consider the talks the main attraction, but I really see them more as hooks to talk to people about interesting topics.
Glad to have returned after missing out on FOSDEM for a while. However, I agree with OP on that undeniable success leading to heavy crowding.
I also missed some hacker hardware stands, there were very few this year.
I always enjoyed chatting with people demoing SDR/small cool hardware hacks as a refreshing break from whatever high-tech presentation room I got stuck in for half a day :-)
It would almost be good to ... have a bigger campus.
> One of my personal highlights of FOSDEM 2026 was a wonderfully simple yet brilliant idea by the Mozilla Foundation: giving away free cookies.
They had an opportunity there to restore the "Cookies are delicious delicacies" message [1] in a more appropriate context, but it seems that's not the sign they went with.
For talks which will obviously be popular, go to the talk before it even if it's not as interesting. It's not common to have two super-popular talks in a row in the same room.
That is how it's supposed to be. You can watch the talks at home at any time but the opportunity to meet random yet like-minded people from all over Europe is unique.
Indeed! It's the 3-4x times I'm going to FOSDEM so I'm mainly looking to connect with people doing cool stuff tbh, otherwise I can just watch stuff online for sure.
> Like every year, I decided to travel to FOSDEM by car. It is not the most relaxed option, but it comes with one very important advantage: arriving early enough to secure a parking spot directly on campus. That also means the journey starts very early in the morning, long before the city fully wakes up.
Curiously backwards. That's one way of reframing a disadvantage as an advantage. The train connection seems to be 3h15m to 3h30m from Neuss train station to FOSDEM. A single connection for the long-distance train in Cologne, the rest is local public transport within Brussels.
The OP goes on to genuinely talk about the advantage of being able to leave when they desire (usually only attending day 1), and the observation that their leaving early was worthwhile, as they were first in line to access the car parking area —- so it would seem very much to not be /s.
Being flexible with DB is expensive. Getting somewhere at all is generally cheap.
Getting somewhere at a reasonable time is usually ok~ish priced.
But being able to just take any train? €€€
And reliable. This is why I (near the border) drive across the border and take the train through Belgium.
https://belgiantrain.be for finding trains and tickets to/from the nearest station, Etterbeek (or use another station if you want to take the tram, where you just swipe a bank card). The ticket is valid for any train going to your destination. For those <26yo, the price is discounted. Welkenraedt is an intercity station with free parking that goes directly to Brussels, in case that happens to be near to someone reading this
Same with the Netherlands. Sadly no intercity stations have free parking but Nuth is on the path north and the highway exit basically ends in its parking lot. After a few stops you can switch to an intercity to Amsterdam
In Europe it repeats every year. Politicians try to steal pensions, workers strike, politicians back off. In America I think the workers would roll over. I wish the workers good luck and I will tolerate the temporary transport disruption if that's the cost of not being America.
As usual, there is hardly a day that doesn't happen, and it got worse this year as they finally started some repairs on critical routes, suppressing many alternatives, or average speeds.
Eurostar was fine for me. Getting to the Eurostar within Germany apparently sucked for some. But I took a later train and didn't have issues there either.
My experience was good: on my way in Paris -> Brussels arrived 10min early, and on my way out Brussels -> Paris I had ~15min delay (apparently because Police had to board the train before Brussels).
Brussels is my native city: I grew up there. If you're at peak traffic hours (8-10am and 3-6pm) during weekdays then, depending where to where you go, there can be really bad traffic jams.
But outside of these hours the car is simply much more convenient. I lived in Brussels for 42 years and did everything that wasn't walking distance by car (very mostly in the pre- Uber days). You simply know where the parking spots are and it's too convenient to have your own car when you come out of the restaurant, without to have to worry about the last bus / last tram / getting mugged.
TFA's author went up early in the morning: he's dodging traffic jams.
For example FOSDEM if I'm concerned there'd be no spot? I'd park on the other side of the Bois de la Cambre and then walk to the campus.
Bicycling? It's nice when you don't have a nice bicycle. Otherwise it's gone in 60 seconds. I also don't see many people bicycling when the weather is bad and, well, let's get real: it rains a huge freaking lot in Brussels.
P.S: FOSDEM is happening in the Ixelles district, adjacent to the Uccle district (the Bois de la Cambre is on both districts). These are the two poshest, classiest, most expensive districts of Brussels with very few high-rises and very few soviet-style buildings with lots of apartments (these exists but in other districts). It's as if FOSDEM was taking place in Beverly Hills. In these posh areas there are parking spots.
Brussels cycling infrastructure has improved a _lot_ in the last decade and the number of cyclists is growing every year while the number of households with a car is decreasing every year (less than half of the househols have a car now).
As they say, there's no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing. The weather in the Netherlands is not very different and it doesn't stop them.
Also the public transportation is by far the best of the country, but that doesn't say a lot.
"But in the end, FOSDEM is not just about talks. It is about meeting people, reconnecting with friends, and having spontaneous conversations that no video stream can fully replace."
I don't go to the talks because they are recorded, it's more about meeting friends around a coffee or a beer.
Maybe in the future, we will have more tables for hacking like at CCC...
I suspect it would be true of most conferences or events like this. The presentations are mostly excuses to justify the event and perhaps to help gather and identify the people sharing the same topics.
FOSDEM is simply not CCC. They are different events run by different people with different visions. If you want CCC you can (with good luck or a group affiliation) go to CCC. Or EMF — Electromagnetic Field.
gyptazy provided a recap of the FOSDEM conference in Brussels, Belgium and it sounds great again. But his concerns about scaling are real and so, also I had often no chance to get a place for a talk. Wondering if it's still worth to get onsite next year or just to watch the recordings afterwards.
You can't attend all 30+ tracks at once anyway, you need to see recordings afterwards anyway if you are remotely interested in consuming the conference. I'd say the experience is just as much about meeting the people behind all the internet handles, getting into a full lecture room one talk in advance and listening in to something you otherwise wouldn't, join something bigger than email lists and matrix rooms, it's a unique wibe you can't find anywhere else.
I wonder if it naturally regulates itself in the way that people who get fed up by the queues don't come back the next year. You can definitely start by adding measures to limit the capacity or whatnot, but in both cases you exclude a certain part of the potential participants. I think I'd rather keep the wibe and ensure people can at least experience it once, than start gatekeeping.
It is been years since from my last time, however already about 10 years ago, it used to be either stick to a room, or stay close to a door and leave 10 minutes earlier, to try to get a spot in another talk, equally staying close to the door.
The number of times I heard this joke: Oh, nobody goes to FOSDEM anymore, it's way too crowded. But it's true. They have a serious overcrowding problem, with the queue outside longer than the number of seats, while the room is already packed.
The app had nice indicators of where the overcrowding was, though. It pushed me to less popular talks, where I discovered some hidden gems. I also came home with a big list of recordings to check out.
Scale has been an issue for years. The last time I went I just hung out in one DevRoom for a chunk of the conference. Running from room to room tends to be an exercise in frustration. There are a lot of people and the campus isn't that straightforward to navigate.
> Not every open source project exists to solve geopolitical problems, and not every contributor arrives with a policy agenda. FOSDEM has always thrived on its diversity of motivations, and maintaining that balance will be increasingly challenging.
It’s not just the FOSS scene but there is an increasing crowd (mostly on the internet) of “everything is political”. Honestly I’m not sure what will happen in the coming years but personally I try to take a step back and detach myself from
all these things. Some (even here on HN) call this as privilege but then so be it I value my mental health more.
The entire idea of F/OSS itself is political, and was very radical. We're just accustomed to it now, so it's not "political", in other words, it's not "controversial". Perhaps F/OSS is -more- political than other spaces because we organize around projects? Here, and on Reddit, we see the fallout of drama all the time in various F/OSS communities over disagreeing over policies. That's... politics.
Unless you happen to live alone and interact with no one, basically every single interaction is undergirded by policies determined by humans. Politics. A computer/phone being built that is purchasable for legal tender, charged by electricity being fed into our homes, where we can send packets in the air, underground and across the world, doesn't happen by magic. It's literally the result of politics.
"Detaching oneself" really just means "not paying attention to politics". And it's a free world to do so, especially for mental health reasons. It's definitely not healthy to be tapped into news/current events all the time and I have to take breaks myself. But for some people, they can't really detach when their literal existence is deemed "political". This is what people refer to when they say it's privileged to detach.
Side Note: criticism of "detaching" is not referring to things like detaching for mental health. Internet trolls aside, that's a strawman argument. What it's referring to is the kind of people who say "oh, I'm just apolitical" or "tech is apolitical, it's just code", when really the status quo is in their favor and they have zero need to ever think about political issues. They would certainly not be "apolitical" if they were being banned from entering public bathrooms or being banned from contributing to F/OSS projects on the basis of their skin color!
I grew up poor enough that my classmates called me "Tramp". Hand-me-downs so threadbare they could pass for actual rubbish, couldn't afford deodorant or adequate dental hygiene; the works. The 10-year-old £5 computer that barely wheezed into life was my escape into a world that genuinely didn't care about any of that.
On the internet (1hr per day, courtesy of the local library), I was just the words on the screen. Nobody knew I was poor. Nobody knew I was weird-looking. Nobody knew anything except whether my code worked and whether my arguments made sense. That pseudonymity wasn't a limitation of the technology... it was the most liberating feature I'd ever experienced.
When people say "everything is political" and "detaching is privilege", I feel like they're describing a completely different internet to the one that saved me. The privilege wasn't being able to ignore politics- the privilege was finally finding a space where the hierarchies that had crushed me in the physical world simply didn't exist.
Bringing identity and real-world political causes into these spaces doesn't make them more inclusive- it recreates the very social hierarchies we'd escaped. When you insist I must care about your cause, acknowledge your identity, or pledge allegiance to your political framework just to contribute code or discuss technology, you're making the space less meritocratic, not more.
The early internet let us be judged solely on the merit of our ideas. That was radical. That was revolutionary. For some of us, that was the only place we'd ever experienced actual equality of opportunity.
When you demand these spaces become "politically aware", what I hear is: "your refuge wasn't good enough, and now you need to care about my problems too." But this was the one place where I didn't have to perform social status, where I didn't have to prove I belonged based on anything other than what I knew and what I could build.
I'm not saying the world's problems don't matter. I'm saying there used to be spaces where we could focus on intellectual puzzles and technical problems without importing every societal conflict. And frankly, for those of us who were outcasts in the physical world, losing that feels like losing the only place we ever truly belonged.
Fwiw, I 100% agree with this. All of a sudden the constant judging is there, it's seeping into the once clean, apolitical world-of-mind. It started on the big tech platforms, the new weary giants of flesh and steel, but it's overflowing into our hacker-minded spaces as well now.
Like US families torn between 2 sides of their politics, they can't even have normal dinners together anymore. They can't communicate without judging, it's an illness, they've been weaponized against each other.
Well, it's hard to break bread with someone who you fundamentally disagree about things like humans rights issues with. Family or not. You don't just skip over that, and in fact why should you? Having blood relations means you have to sit and eat with someone who thinks you or people you know shouldn't exist or shouldn't be allowed to have the same rights as other people? I'm very glad that we've normalized not glossing over this kind of stuff anymore, because of "family".
> Well, it's hard to break bread with someone who you fundamentally disagree about things like humans rights issues with.
It's actually not. It's very easy to get along with people, even those from whom we have vastly differing moral axioms, if we only try. Sadly these days many people are disinterested in trying, believing (wrongly) that they will make the world a better place if they sow more division.
It used to work quite well. Perhaps together you can think of a cause to the rift, and try to actively fight it instead of each other. Start with commonalities, not differences. I think it’s important to, at the very least, never stop trying.
The question assumes we know what someone believes before we've spoken to them. That's the actual problem here, people are being excluded based on assumed beliefs rather than demonstrated behaviour.
Opinions evolve through exposure to different viewpoints, not through isolation from them. The homophobes and racists of the 80s who changed their minds didn't do so because they were shut out of communities - they changed because they were forced to actually interact with the people they'd made assumptions about. That contact broke down the assumptions.
When you exclude someone pre-emptively because you've decided what they must believe, you've eliminated the possibility of that evolution happening. You've also replicated the exact mechanism that made 80s bigotry so pernicious: denying participation based on identity or assumed characteristics rather than actual conduct.
Everyone thinks they're right. The racists thought they were right. The homophobes thought they were right. You think you're right. I think I'm right. That's why behaviour-based boundaries matter more than belief-based ones. Judge people on what they actually do in the space, not what you assume they think.
If your moral framework requires everyone to already agree with you before they're allowed to participate, you're not building a community - you're enforcing an orthodoxy. And orthodoxies don't evolve, they just calcify.
How can society become less polarised if we normalise an extremely wide spectrum of different moral axioms? To reduce polarisation, people with extremist moral axioms must stop having them, which can't happen if extremist moral axioms are accepted.
For one, I think that the people you have put the "extreme" label on, are not as extreme as you think they are, and indeed could be quite agreeable when you'd seek them out and sit down with them over tea and try to communicate with them with more nuance than a 160 char message can deliver.
Yes, you will be able to find examples that confirm your statement, but they are an exceedingly small minority, probably despised (almost) as much by their "own group" (as far as people actually feel part of a group) as they are by you.
I believe it is the (incentives of) the (social)media and the bots that have made you believe otherwise, over time and in small steps.
I don't know if you notice what you're doing, but you're turning a low stakes / no confrontation situation into a high stakes / confrontational situation for no discernible benefit.
This type of self destructive behavior may seem worthwhile in the moment, but in the long run it doesn't bring any benefits, because you have to fight the people you're declaring war against and if the list of enemies is long enough, you're almost certainly guaranteed to lose against one of them.
I don't show it but honestly I also find it hard not to attribute the negative consequences (partially in Brussels funnily enough) of your preferred policies to people like you.
Sometimes it gets hard to hide that.
Anonymity was a given in the beginnings of the internet, and we now need to fight hard for any remaining form of it. Your post makes me longing for my past, whereas GPs post makes me longing for our future.
The virtual world(s) felt like equality of opportunity because everything was a blank canvas, or some canvas that barely had any fingerprints on it. For a lot of people the internet currently consists out of WhatsApp, Facebook, and Google News. So tell me, what is truly radical, what is revolutionary anymore?
So if someone wants to close your local library you wouldn't have a problem? If someone decides that you can't have a £5 computer, you have to subscribe to a computer service?
Read this and tell me free software is not politics
You're right that free software philosophy is political, and I benefited enormously from that. But there's a crucial difference between "this tool has political implications" and "you must actively engage with every political cause to participate." I could contribute to GNU projects without Stallman asking about my views beyond software freedom, the code compiled or it didn't, the patch worked or it didn't. The philosophy was clear, but participation didn't require political conformity beyond that shared goal. What I'm pushing back against is the insistence that every space must become a venue for every political discussion, where "everything is political" becomes "you must actively care about my specific causes in the way I care about them, right now, in this space."
The beauty of libraries and cheap computers wasn't just that they existed through political decisions, it's that I could use them without performing any particular political identity beyond their core function. If libraries close or computing becomes subscription-only, I'll fight that because access matters. But I can defend access whilst wanting spaces where the primary focus remains the technical work. The right to read is worth defending. So is the right to just read, without every reading group becoming a political caucus.
I'm not describing just the internet. I'm describing the nature of the world around us, both in meatspace and on in the internet in the context of this discussion. As regrettable as it is (I mean, who doesn't hate politicians?), it's just all politics, regardless if one chooses to detach or not.
That pseudonymity you're describing still exists in many spaces to this day. I have no idea what many (most?) of the contributors on F/OSS projects look like, or anything about them unless they voluntarily divulged it. You don't have to "pledge allegiance to political frameworks", not for any F/OSS project that I'm aware of.
What people do have to do more now is treat other people with respect, which the old internet very much did not do well. There are many people who can code, so projects actually don't have to keep around people who can't conduct themselves nicely.
"When you demand these spaces become ..."
"Demand" is a strawman argument. What changed overall is that people bring themselves into these spaces, not just a pseudonymous username. That comes with different expectations for conduct. Do you miss the flamewars of the past?
"where I didn't have to prove I belonged"
What F/OSS projects do you have to do this for? Basically every project I've contributed to had nothing like that.
"... there used to be spaces where we could focus on intellectual puzzles and technical problems without importing every societal conflict"
While I can empathize with this, I'm not sure if I entirely agree with this recollection of the internet. People could still be cruel to anyone who happened to reveal anything about themselves, as humans tend to do, that was "atypical", shall we say. I don't see why you still can't focus on technical problems, because unless you're a moderator, nobody is forcing you to comment on anything except technical discussions.
Just because the idea of F/OSS software is/was relatively radical and a certain type of political act when applied in certain situations, does not mean that it necessarily needs to concern itself with any other political act. After all, all acts are political, right?
To extend your world picture just one more step - for those people whose "existance is political", a F/OSS world that does not concern itself with irrelevant politics provides that very haven where only the merit of ideas is considered.
I would go further and claim that anyone who sees themselves as "apolitical" just basically thinks their own opinion is the only true way to see things "rationally" (and as such "fact" and not an opinion; nothing to be "political" about), and everyone else is just plain wrong/mistaken. Since they're not ready to admit this to themselves and others, they hide behind the "apolitical" label. Otherwise they would see that their own opinion is a "political statement" on equal basis as others. It doesn't even make a difference if you voice it or not.
This strategy works poorly to avoid conflict and friction (life), since one just shifts conflict to reappear elsewhere. Hence the often claimed need to self-isolate "for mental health" to avoid getting in contact with... positions such as one's own, and half-suppressed anger at all those that just don't see what is RIGHT.
This closely matches the way a few of my "apolitical" friends behave.
They mostly think their opinion is the right one, and others are just flailing around not understanding the real "objective" "truth". But they never spent more than a minute thinking things through and re-evaluating their biases and "objective reality"...
They then spend quite some time ranting about things that are obviously political, but on the same breath say they are proud not to vote...
One can recognize the importance of defining processes for how decisions pertaining to a soceity are being made, and adhering to those, while, at the same time, trying not to judge views other than yours, or simply trying not to engage too much in debates pertaining to that process. In other words, you can choose not to let politics seep to much into your identify.
I am a hacker, a baker of breads, a father, a debater, a thinker. Period. Not libertarian or whatever. My ideas sometimes are more like a democrat, sometimes more republican. I often like Bernie Sanders, and Schwarzenegger would be a nice, good, kind republican president imho. I don't like being seen as a part of any of these groups. I enjoy discussing reasons for "the 2 party" (but not really 2 party-) system much more than discussing which is morally superior.
This, to me, is a valid stance. For some it is the way to stay sane.
Some views deserve to be judged. I've met people who genuinely believe there is nothing wrong with killing millions of people just because they aren't like you. Most people are horrified by that idea, but he isn't, he finds it quite normal, as normal as taking an umbrella because it's raining. I think it's okay to judge that.
I agree. I just want to tell you that those people are an exceedingly small minority.
To deny another human being the rights you enjoy is imho the same as denying yourself those rights (because I, as a 3rd person, see both people as equal, and otherwise there is a paradox). This is the basis of our justice system, we "put people away" in cages, and in some places even kill them, because they believed their right to swing their fist does not end at someone else's nose. But presumably they would not enjoy a fist to the nose themselves.
But does it mean "100% open borders"? (notice the 100%) Should those rights pertain to (higher) animals? (notice the "higher")
There is nuance to explore, there are many ways to be a humanist. I.e., dumping mosquito nets in a mosquito rich area may be seen as helping, but not to local mosquito net makers (and thus you are not helping anyone in the long term, because the mosquito net makers are all bankrupt).
There is always nuance. And there are always exceptions, and your statements generalize exceptions to much larger groups, demanding action on a scale that is unwarranted, imho. Both sides are responding vividly to exceptions, to lack of nuance, to 160 character statements in all caps.
I've met an exceedingly small number of people who state the worldview outright, but I've met a much larger number of people whose actions are only consistent with that internal worldview.
That is thus all solely your interpretation. I think it is very dangerous to make assumptions about people's internal worldview and judging people on that assumption. In fact I think you have just expressed quite well what I object against, precisely.
>The entire idea of F/OSS itself is political, and was very radical.
Political and radical as it pertains to software, not whatever the grievance of the day to virtue signal over is.
FOSS projects are tired of the incessant US-centric, champagne socialist politicking destroying their communities. Thankfully peak nonsense is behind us. You no longer have power.
>But for some people, they can't really detach when their literal existence is deemed "political".
Everyone's existence is "political." It's a privileged position to think your existence is "political" while others are not.
Why do you think that politics has to relate to the grievance of the day? Every interaction between two people is political. You can pretend it's not, if you're happy with the status quo and seeking to defuse movements that seek change, because you don't like change. This is an indicator of privilege because only people who benefit from the status quo seek to prevent it from changing.
with AI we have entered capitalistic computing, where it's the scale of computing that makes it political (before, it was a clever idea that brought the political thing, like MP3, encryption, etc.). As it is massive scale (think 2GWatt data centers), I'm afraid the poor little FOSS guy won't be able to be as relevant as before. It's not David against Goliath anymore, it's FOSS against billions of zombies.
I happen to be one of these FOSS guys though and as you do, I think it's better to stay off to keep my mental health; else it makes me feel powerless. How sad: 20 years ago I thought the fight was possible.
The change was the rise of "cloud", with saas, paas and even iaas. The world no longer ran software they controlled (even if it were proprietary you still controlled windows NT and Office 95) on hardware they owned.
This comment has so many statements framed by a lot of specific political premises that not everyone agrees on. It's hard to talk about political neutrality without going to the next higher meta language where we view our own interests alongside others' independent interests more abstractly.
A lot of the problems people see with OSS are a result of "free/libre" having been successful at training OSS enthusiasts to embrace commensalist thinking, bomb-shelter monasticism, and to reject the consumer but then complain when the consumer has to turn to the network-effect entrenched platforms while other businesses lack the tools to compete in open networks that were never built.
The trend is global and inherent to online psychological coupling and self-selection bias. The longer we go without healthy information spaces, the more the population will regress.
There does however seem to be a "free/libre" vs open source rift along the Atlantic ridge, and it is being wedged apart by the US government flirting with a return to isolationism mixed with bullying and self-enforced credible threat geopolitics.
It is really counter-productive for Europeans to think American OSS people are monolithic with US tech giants and the US federal government. Nonetheless, pluralism is good, and innovation will win, so I suppose it's just another hairpin in the game.
I for one am getting pretty sick of it. FOSS is by nature apolitical, pre-competitive and for me has always been an intellectual exercise. This is the only way it can power Chinese clouds, Azure, AWS and GCP, and the many EU sovereign systems we're going to see. To me it's a place to find kind people who are enthusiastic about tech, like me.
Now I find myself judged when using Nix, genAI, Blockchain, Omarchy (and by extension even Framework), Podcasting 2.0 related things, Centos Stream... It doesn't end. So many people that divide the world in good/bad, them/us. I'm tuning out tbh.
(as an aside, I wish I could have some indication of how polarized the voting here on HN is ;))
I think that’s a very idealistic view of FOSS that is detached from reality. In the late 90s and early 00s we were fighting the crypto wars, making DeCSS illegal, DMCA, EUCD. There was a lot of infighting between free software and open source proponents. Many FSF campaigns were very political. I got bashed by some other FOSS people I knew in ~2006 for using and contributing to CentOS because it was Red Hat-based (evil empire or whatever).
The difference is that social media is amplifying things a lot more and there is a culture of destroying people in public (made easier by social media amplification).
It’s really the same issue as outside FOSS, social media creates stronger bubbles, more extremes, more grifters, and more amplification of crap.
It's about governance of society, about how decisions concerning society are being made. About what processes we adhere to. About agreeing to follow those process together, instead of resorting to primitive things like violence.
then FOSS is political. It's about processes we adhere to and how decisions are made. Microsoft makes a decision to ban the ICC from Windows and has a process for this. Linux has a different process where they can't make that decision because it's impossible.
"Concerning society" is important here. We do not codify the use of FOSS in any laws. At most we have decided that people can make up licenses and that we agree to adhere to the terms of any creator stated in licenses. We don't say what those terms must be or how we come to those terms.
I just like some terms more than others, they work for me, I think they make the world a better, more interesting place. Where is the politics in that?
Your comment reads to me like it will derail the conversation about FOSDEM into one about (American) politics and HN's policy regarding political stories.
While tools and software itself is not political, the people behind it are. eg. When CEOs and founders and project leads leverage their audience for politics, then their tools are absolutely a political choice. Be it DHH’s latest fasho ramblings or every time you do ‘swift build’ - Tim Cook takes a selfie with a sex offender.
But let’s refocus on FOSDEM and the mission of libre software to allow us to exist without “corporate oversight” or to just build, with tools made by other humans.
> When CEOs and founders and project leads leverage their audience for politics, then their tools are absolutely a political choice. Be it DHH’s latest fasho ramblings or every time you do ‘swift build’ - Tim Cook takes a selfie with a sex offender.
I don't follow. Are you implying that by using Ruby on Rails or Omarchy one is fasho aligned ? Or that people that use Swift somehow support sex offenders ?
More like... when they use their platforms to promote whatever, you helping those platforms move forward is essentially helping them push the whatever forward. I don't get why is this so hard to understand. Unfortunately, we've gotten to a place where picking a tool is also an expression of your support for the politics of the people/corps behind it.
I don't think your examples are comparable. DHH is (/was?) the face of ruby on rails and basecamp, whereas Cook is just the latest person at the helm of a tremendously large (personnel-wise) company someone else built. There are only 2 relevant phone types to consider, and please don't tell me Google/Samsung are morally superior to Apple. Even for ruby on rails, hundreds (thousands ?) of people have been contributing to it. It's not really "owned" by DHH anymore, and it's 21 years old, well before these rants.
And not to compare badness, but DHH is ranting publicly on his blog about the projected % of white people in Norway in 2096 and quoting white supremacists in his lamentation about the UK not being more white. Blaming the increasingly totalitarian actions the UK has been taking on immigrants and not the literal lawmakers setting those policies is certainly an opinion to hold. It's a whole lot more in your face.
I do agree about Omarchy linux though- that's still very closely associated with DHH and I'm not touching that with a 39.5ft pole, let alone before getting into technical issues. I was honestly pretty disappointed to see the typical dev personalities online cover Omarchy linux despite the crap DHH has been spewing on his blog.
The immigrant policies in the UK and the USA enjoy widespread support. This is not authoritarianism imposed on the population by the lawmakers — the population are craving authoritarianism (on other people besides themselves).
By politics, do you mean politics. Because of course OSS has always been political.
Generally people afraid of politics are using the term as an empty space for some form of specific politics they want to run away from. In which case, why not just say what you mean.
It looks okay to me. The links are a bit too low contrast yes, but I think the normal text is black. The bigger issue is likely the font weight, it must be at like 200/300.
"Most of them were advertising one kind of service or another."
10y ago we had the issue with one of the talks in the IOT devroom which was very "corporate" with one presentation turning into the promotion of a proprietary product.
As a US citizen, when I see the phrase "European digital sovereignty," I'm a bit concerned that our OSS enthusiast and activist allies in that geography are learning to associate American OSS with American tech companies and US government. This could deepen the old free/libre vs open source divide that seems to have polarized along the separation by the Atlantic ocean. If so, in a time where Americans may be soon head-to-head with a runaway tyrannical government, our EU allies will be busy retreating into free/libre commensalist thinking that seem tunnel-visioned on using government funding to escape MS Word, something that is going to be the last thing on their minds if actual sovereignty concerns emerge.
The more general goal will remain to protect all individual freedoms from all tyrannical governments, not to depend on them. It will remain to use better information technology to enhance the functioning of all governments and to create healthy competition in all markets to protect consumer choice. American OSS has not forgotten this one bit. Our country is just having a moment, and it won't help if EU OSS participation writes us off as casualties while EU OSS focuses on "uniquely European" solutions.
I don't think anyone is confused about American OSS and American corporations run amok with wealth accumulation and regulatory capture. It's a European conference held at a time when governments are waking up to the realization that foreign-owned proprietary software is a bad idea, and the idea of "digital sovereignty" has been around for a bit and did not originate at FOSDEM. The governments also seem to understand that OSS helps with transparency and minimizing costs by investing into a commons (though the message bears repeating; FSFE, EDRI and such do a good job getting it out), so hopefully they'll stick with that and not replicate the US model.
How did I lump both together when I specifically called them out separately, lol.
Everybody understands OSS/free software is global (though copyright/left is still subject to export controls and other laws.) No question about that. And I was specifically talking about proprietary software there, you even copied that in your reply...Proprietary software is bad; foreign-owned is even worse, like the EU has learned recently when Microsoft cuts your email short, for example.
The "US model" is obviously big monopolies or duopolies run unchecked, allowed to buy, prevent and starve competition, then seeking regulatory capture to secure a moat. That is what people know, for better or for worse. No laymen knows the FSF, or what that guy in Arkansas in the xkcd is doing for the digital infrastructure.
I think the main challenge for Europe will be to manage those public investments in an effective way for people's benefit. As far as I know, there are few precedents, and maybe nothing of that scale. China pulls off of open/free software significantly, mostly to avoid US proprietary software, but to my knowledge they don't give much/anything back. So it seems challenging, but I'm also excited for how/if they pull it off.
By the way, I donate to both US and EU free software and digital rights organizations. It was not my intention to nurture your conception of a divide, if that is what you took from my comment.
> The more general goal will remain to protect all individual freedoms from all tyrannical governments, not to depend on them.
This is more of an American pov and will probably be a disconnect for Europeans. Their governments don't screw them as much, so they probably don't see them as tyrannical. Those governments investing in proprietary software to move away from other proprietary software would be a mistake; so government investment into free/open source should be seen as a win, not something to shy away from in the name of individual freedom.
> How did I lump both together when I specifically called them out separately, lol.
Dude, "American OSS and American corporations" is simple conjunction, a union, treating two things as one so that you can make a single predicate statement about them. If you mean to make separate statements about the two things, maybe don't group them into the same sentence phrase?
I asked you not to group these things together. If this provokes you to begin regurgitating "free/libre" ideology all over again, you obviously think that being asked to separate American OSS and American corporations is somehow incompatible with OSS or "free/libre". American OSS marched in front of Microsoft to demand refunds. Get it right.
At this point you're clearly misconstruing my statements, and/or have some problems with reading comprehension. Your others comments don't leave much to be positive about, either.
You would have been able to see this by looking at a graph of my karma against the hour of day. There's truly an ideological dispersion across the Atlantic.
OSS and FOSS are global, not American or EU or anything. The geopolitical situation is on another plane. FOSS can and will be used as a tool for strategic autonomy, for better and for worse.
Why would one at this very moment look with suspicion at a FOSS contributor for the sole reason (s)he's American?
1.) it's quiet clear the European sovereignity is a pitch to get resources into the OS eco system.
2.) it's very easy: after governments companies ans users will follow as os proofed to work.
3.) this is not us vs eu,.it is just us vs. The rest of the world. Canada and Mexico are threatened by Trumpy as well and located on another side of the Atlantic and probably their government are interested into OS as well.
4.) As there is not an os business model of US will work , money and users will be else where starting in Europe. It will be easier for Open Source somewhere else.
5.) so this is my last bit: your comment sounds like American don't want to protest against Trump because it is too dangerous. Well, that's the result as 50% of people voted for Trump. In your scene: Less resources for open source in the us
> your comment sounds like American don't want to protest against Trump because it is too dangerous
At this time, we are still openly committed to the 2nd amendment in defense of the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 6th and so on. I am encouraging others to participate in open-carry demonstrations to make it clear to the authoritarians that they will not get the intimidating optics of an unopposed crackdown against a helpless crowd that they want. Personally, I grew up shooting things, so handling bootlickers will be natural if it comes to it.
Technically enabled solutions to better communicate, organize, and represent the will of the people would help a lot. Bomb-shelter thinking will not help much. If the US devolves into a Russian style authoritarian state, one where I will no longer be welcomed off the plane, the EU will have more to worry about than Windows. My ideas on the technically enabled side are complex but sound, so I encourage any interested in doing full stack Rust to get a hold of me by clicking links. I'll be finishing up some shader programming and feedback rendering today as the next piece of my strategy.
> the EU will have more to worry about than Windows
The US can, right now, crash pretty much the entire western industry/economy by disconnecting their digital services.
The US already threatens the western world with that power. They already use it.
Of course the EU has to care about that. The reason they accepted the dependency was that for a long time they were looking up to the US, and couldn't imagine that the US could become an enemy in the space of a few weeks.
Now the US has proven that they could realistically go from this state that the western world trusted to declaring war to allies in a matter of weeks. Of course everybody is scared.
The EU will have more to worry about than Windows, but it also has to worry about Windows. Trump banned the head of the ICC from Microsoft, successfully disrupting their prosecution of America, via pure software means.
Outside the constitution, outside their jurisdiction, and not lawful.
Popular sovereignty always works. One way or another.
The most wrong opinion in the debate is to claim that we will be punished for open carry demonstrations. Only an abuse victim excuses the attacker, and allowing the attacker to do what they want is just catch 22.
As a prolific, up-to-date not sticking my head in the sand vibe coder, I was apalled by the amount of disregard and denial of the way that Artificial Super Intelligence is redefining software. Maybe if we face reality as an open source community we can eventually come to tackle evil geniuses the likes of Sam Altman and such. The current approach is NOT working!
My only disappointment with this year's geopolitcs-enhanced (always a welcome addition to tech by the way, as tech is ultimately steered by politics!) FOSDEM is a great underrepresentation of mainland China, and more generally the whole Global South. It is sad to see this omission in a time when the EU's free movement needs more like minded allies than ever. And what can be more free than that untethered by the chains of empire.
Sure, there was some mention of Brazil in some talks. And yes, a couple of China specific speakers etc, but in my view this is almost cancelled by the inclusion of topics about taiwan. Similarly the China focused talks mention "specific risks" stemming ostensibly from a differing system of governance.
Almost as if corporate sponsorships induce self censorships which limit true organizing effort.
FOSDEM is the Free Open Source Developers European Meetup. It's expected that people from China don't like traveling a long way to Europe. They have other FOS conferences in China.
Corporate sponsorships enabling "self-censorship"? That's rich from someone whitewashing authoritarianism. If FOSDEM underrepresented China, good - tech thrives without Beijing's chains. Bring real open-source contributions next time, not propaganda.
I for one found this event really sad. It's like the OSS community has rejected the past 5 years of software and technological changes and now choses to live in a retro computing bubble.
We're in 2026, hardware is made in dark factories in shenzhen in fully automated assembly lines by the million of units. Software is written using LLMs hosted in gigantic datacenters. Millions of people are now writing their own software with vibe coding platforms from their phones
What is the FOSDEM community's answer to the real concerns that these changes pose ? Let's hand solder raspberry pis ! let's self host LLMS from 2 years ago on FreeBSD ! Look, i can run wasn linux on this risc-v cpu !
These takes are completely out of touch with reality, no wonder that nobody younger than 40 was attending the conference. The next generation is doing something else and rightly so.
> What is the FOSDEM community's answer to the real concerns that these changes pose ? Let's hand solder raspberry pis ! let's self host LLMS from 2 years ago on FreeBSD ! Look, i can run wasn linux on this risc-v cpu !
Maybe, just maybe, they're having fun? FOSS is not only about corporate open-source, but also genuine curiosity. Both can have their place.
> no wonder that nobody younger than 40 was attending the conference. The next generation is doing something else and rightly so.
I saw a lot of students at FOSDEM, attending, presenting and helping the at organization.
OSS original point wasn't just to have fun among nerds, but to have a real impact on the world. Fun and curiosity is fine, but there's a line where it becomes a tech themed larp event, and FOSDEM is trending towards the later.
Corporate Open Source should have its place at FOSDEM. The linux dinosaur companies such as Redhat are still there. But what about the new ones ? What about Mistral, Odoo ? Even the 'evil' ones such as facebook, github, etc, aren't they contributing a lot of open software ? Aren't they more relevant than let's say Olimex ?
There were some students, yes but the attendence is growing old, and the chit chat is more about 'remember this and that' than 'we're building the future'
I did find devrooms, stands, and main track talks on this.
> Even the 'evil' ones such as facebook, github, etc, aren't they contributing a lot of open software
Google is one of the two lead financial sponsors of FOSDEM (the other being RedHat). So clearly, there doesn't seem to be any restriction or judgement by the organizers on whether BigTech is 'evil'. I get that Jack Dorsey (of Square/Block) withdrew his main track talk the year prior, which was unfortunate.
> the chit chat is more about 'remember this and that' than 'we're building the future'
Well, for better or for worse, FOSDEM is not exclusively a tech start-up event.
Iirc. Jack was accepted by the organizers but pressured out by the community.
Also, about github: Had a chat with the Gitlab chap doing the Git talk in the main track. Apparently they dialed back their involvement with upstream git quite a bit.
Github is currently providing a lot of infra gratis (thanks!) but is at best neutral to code and community.
It doesn't to me at all, it is mainly focused on self hosting llms, which is a complete deadend. It just isn't feasible to self host the useful models, the hardware requirements are just too big.
The current topic of focus around AI are: how to adapt development practice to agentic coding, agent harness, agent orchestration, mcp integrations, etc.
I guess there is some unease in the oss community to rely on large companies to run and host the models. But this isn't entirely new, we also relied on big companies to manufacture our computers. It's just the way it is.
> Well, for better or for worse, FOSDEM is not a tech start-up event.
It is weird, there are a lot of startups present, look at all the stands showcasing projects. Aren't those startups ? What I noticed is that they are usually funded by public grants rather than VCs. I am not sure why this is the case.
I met several people self–hosting LLMs including a man from Tenstorrent demonstrating their accelerator card.
> What I noticed is that they are usually funded by public grants rather than VCs. I am not sure why this is the case.
American VC culture derives from America's privileged position in the global financial system. It can't be replicated by a country that doesn't have a ton of money floating around looking for investments.
Second reason: nobody likes what American VC culture created, so they don't want it to be replicated. Government grant funding can make decisions on axes other than profitability.
Public grants are nice but they have couple of shortcomings and which is why they can get you only that far. They are normally low in capital, the execution is really slow (couple of months to one year), and larger grants too involve politics. The process is too formal (inflexible and too time-consuming) and also quite discriminating to individuals/small-groups who do have the big ideas but are not running the business already (I mean how can they). Proposal evaluation also has its own shortcomings - there's very little incentive for the actual experts to join the evaluation process (it's paid pennies) and generally speaking this leads to another chicken&egg problem - you're presenting something novel to the pool of people who might not have the capacity to understand the idea - neither the vision nor execution.
That said, I am not attracted to the VC culture but their process delivers the value which creates successful companies.
NLNET is always coming up at FOSDEM. Since they have a decent track record of issuing grants, the EU delegates them some money to use in their own less bureaucratic granting process. They call this "cascade funding". NLNET has funded a lot of random individual projects you can find on their website. Nominally, your proposal must have something to do with their goals.
This year there is more emphasis on bringing complete solutions to market. Previously they were funding much more experimentation.
> This year there is more emphasis on bringing complete solutions to market. Previously they were funding much more experimentation.
That's the step in the right direction however there's what I believe is a major issue with the NLNET scheme - there is no fastrack possibility for really great ideas with very potent market impact - you have to spend (lose) ~year to prove your idea is worthy by applying to Zero Commons or similar grant instead of just getting the 200-500k to really get the project hitting the ground.
One year is exceptionally long period in tech, and if the idea is right, you need to have all the resources to execute it - working solely on the project for the whole year for 50,000 EUR is simply not the strategy that can work out in a highly competitive (world) space.
How should they know your project is worth investing 500k? I heard they've got 3x8M, per year I presume, so 500k is a huge chunk of that. Everyone thinks their project is worth 500k, what makes yours different from the rest?
Yes, many might believe that their project is worth more than it really is but in my proposition authors of the idea are not the ones who get to decide that but people from NLNET or whatever grant. What I am saying is that currently there is no such process at all and this is a foundational problem with the way how these grants are working.
I guess not. Can you specify it in more concrete terms? They're not just buying your project for an arbitrary price, or VC-investing, they're paying your living costs and hosting costs while you create a donation to the public good, that's how grants work.
They give you 500k if you have a really good reason why you need that... and why the result is worth it... and why your project is more worth it than all the other several projects, combined, they could spend the same 500k on. Most of them are one or two people's living cost for 6 months to a year or so.
I genuinely hope you're a bot. If you're not then please consider being respectful in your conversations and address the question being asked rather than moving goalposts - it is extremely annoying. If you're out of your arguments, learn to say "I don't know".
And I also do hope, if you're a human, that you're not sitting anywhere close to decision making committee be it in NLNET or any other grant program because if you do, it fits into the (terrible) narrative of software market in the EU.
I think the one out of touch is you. Do you really think that depending on proprietary third party services is in the spirit of open source software? You didn't just say people should depend on proprietary models, whose output could at least be considered open source, you're talking about "vibe coding platforms" like lovable, which contain an unavoidable proprietary infrastructure component.
You're also engaging in historical revisionism. "5 years ago" means you're expecting everyone to have jumped on Github Copilot on day one or else they're behind. LLM assisted software development only really took off in the last three years and even then you were still a trailblazer.
Have an AI track focused on how to use AI to improve OSS software instead of how to run LLama on RISC-V.
Invite the open source developpers behind popular OSS AI frameworks such as opencode, etc.
Invite talkers from large companies that produce open source software and models such as Mistral.AI
Invite talkers from companies that run OSS LLMs at scale such as groq
Invite the people who build drones in Ukraine, (probably the most succesful open hardware story to date). Have drone building workshops / drone piloting stands
But the AI talked about 3 years ago are not the same kind of projects that are being talked about today. It's rapidly evolving. There is a lot of new scope available for new open source projects to take. This isn't open source reimplementing the same thing for 3 years straight.
That's certainly what the companies who stand to profit want us to believe. But I don't think it is. I think it's yet another hype storm without any actual utility to back it up.
Remember this is just one conference. This is not a top–down imposition of a new European world order. While the amount of policy discussion is quite high — out of necessity now — and EU representatives attend — this event is still a lot of developers coming together.
This is also why the EU has a hard time. America prefers the capitalist model. EU is trying to find ways encourage individual developers each with their own interests to contribute to shared European goals (which the devs also share but might not find interesting), and they're trying to do this without directly saying "you there, go and do this", and that's harder than herding cats.
For instance they do it through NLNET funding. Devs can propose projects and the ones the EU wants to fund will receive funding. It's a roundabout way to do things. Let's see if it pays off.
LLM turds will degrade more and more over time. The newbies will become even dumber and people with actual knowledge will be several steps over anthing else trained to copy and paste from bullshitters.
Just like how novel reading, newspapers, music, rock music, the internet, computer games all made everyone super dumb and the world ended.
I am definitely sure that this time you are right and the world will actually end this time, everyones going to end up way dumber than you, or if they dont, you will still pretend it happened and be smug about it on the internet.
Mobile computer games compared to the ones from the 80's, 90's, and early 00's? For sure. Ditto with tons of best sellers, which are very dull and dumbed down compared to what I could read in Spanish "Dollar Stores" like shops in Spain such as the books Clarke/PKD and Orwell novels for very little, less than what $2 were in Pesetas (pre Euro Spanish currency) in late 90's.
Nowadays you have AI generated books which are very surpar even if they look an impressive exercise of LLM's.
Would you mind showing some compassion for the unintelligent, it's none of their fault.. It's incentives, sociodynamics and manifold other preconditions that bring about these symptoms.
One of these is AI proliferation. GP is not merely virtue signalling — GP is directly contributing to raising average intelligence by discouraging reliance on AI.
> let's self host LLMS from 2 years ago on FreeBSD
Sounds brilliant. 2024 LLMs were great, and hosted in gigantic datacenters. South Park did an episode on ChatGPT in 2023 to assist with the timescales.
If we can run Free LLMs on a desktop PC that's competitive with 2024 a massive win.
Unless of course you believe that AI will continue to increase exponentially, in which case we're heading for such a different world in 10-15 years that it's meaningless to worry about it and you might as well have fun before the AI decides to kill us all
Offline videos are available here: https://video.fosdem.org/2026
It's organized by room which you can find here: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/tracks/
Hi, I'm trying to find Lennart Poettering's presentations, but they don't seem to be available yet? https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/speaker/lennart_poettering/ Thanks
It takes time before all videos have been edited and reviewed for publishing.
You can see the progress schedule here: https://review.video.fosdem.org/overview
Look forward to ye olde uncle Lennart's old-timey sales pitch.
I'm gonna summarize the Varlink talk: DBus is, and I quote, "very very very complex" and his system with JSON for low-level IPC is, in fact, the best thing since sliced bread and has no significant flaws. It works basically just like HTTP so the web people will love it. Kernel support for more great shit pending! I'm not sure where the hardon for a new IPC system with lernel (keeping that typo) support is from, but he's been trying for 15 years now. AFAICT, the service discovery problem could be solved by a user space service without much trouble. I mean if the whole thing wasn't an exercise in bad technological taste.
I think you are misrepresenting this;
Varlink is based on much more conventional UNIX technology than Dbus, which is decades old: You connect to a named UNIX socket through its socket file in the filesystem (man page: unix(7)).
This is an old mechanism and it is known to work well. It does not require a broker service, it works right at system startup, and it does not require a working user database for permission checks (which would be a circular dependency for systemd in some configurations). If at all, I am surprised that systemd didn't use that earlier.
The main thing that Varlink standardizes on top of that is a JSON-based serialization format for a series of request/response pairs. But that seems like a lightweight addition.
It also does not require kernel support to work, the kernel support is already there. He mentioned in the talk that he'd like to be able to "tag" UNIX sockets that speak varlink as such, with kernel support. But that is not a prerequisite to use this at all. The service discovery -- and he said that in the talk as well -- is simply done by listing socket files in the file system, and by having a convention for where they are created.
What do you connect to, when you connect to varlink, if there is no broker service?
Those are pathname UNIX domain sockets, so you address them through the socket file, which is conventionally stored somewhere under /run.
You can run "netstat --listening --unix" to list the UNIX domain servers on your system, to get an impression.
See https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/unix.7.html
It's kinda weird to present this as a DBus alternative when it doesn't even offer the same facilities, particularly many-to-many communication.
Though I have a pretty good idea of where a Varlink broker would turn up and which init system it would be tied to.
Very typical systemd–developer style.
I do not share your view of old timey sales pitch, at least for the talk about systemd nspawn OCI container support.
If anything, that talk was a tad low effort, with even dismissive answers — "Yes" and "No?" as full answers to audience questions, with no follow up?! Still very informative though!
The Varlink talk really was very salesy for a Fosdem presentation. Shouldn't be long until the recording becomes available, feel free to tell me I was wrong after watching it.
It's mainly re-hashed. I think I've seen the same talk twice before? At least once.
It's a very "I've made a cool thing. This is what I think is cool about it" type of talk. Which I don't think is uncommon for FOSDEM. Maybe a bit uncommon for a higher profile figure like Lennart.
> It's mainly re-hashed. I think I've seen the same talk twice before? At least once.
He held a similar talk at All Systems Go I think (I missed the talk here at FOSDEM).
> It's a very "I've made a cool thing. This is what I think is cool about it" type of talk.
Varlink isn't something he just made up, he mearly "adopted it" (started making use of it). It existed before, but I don't know anything that really made use of it before.
Who made it up, then?
The official-looking website at https://varlink.org doesn't give any information about who the authors are, as far as I can tell, but the screenshots show the username "kay". There's a git repo for libvarlink [1] where the first commits (from 2017) are by Kay Sievers, who is one of the systemd developers.
An announcement post [2] from later in 2017, by Harald Hoyer, says that the varlink protocol was created by Kay Sievers and Lars Karlitski in "our team", presumably referring to the systemd team.
So the systemd developers "adopted" their own thing from themselves?
[1] https://github.com/varlink/libvarlink
[2] https://harald.hoyer.xyz/2017/12/18/varlink/
While I guess you aren't wrong, I also wouldn't say you are entirely correct that Kay is a systemd developer. He use to work on udev, but hasn't been active in any meaningful way on it for 2 years before varlinks release[1]. For what it was made I can't really say, but Lennart hadn't start integrating Varlink until a while after its release (I think I remember it being like 2021 or so when he started making use of it, after another check it seems the start of varlink stuff in systemd was 2019[2]).
[1]: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commits/main/?author=kays...
[2]: https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Asystemd%2Fsystemd+varlink...
Kay Sievers' Wikipedia page cites a blog post by Lennart Poettering [1] which says that systemd was designed in "close cooperation" with Kay Sievers and that Harald Hoyer was also involved, so it seems pretty clear that he's on the team that develops systemd, the team that Harald Hoyer referred to as "our team". All three of them gave a talk [2] together in 2013 about what they were developing.
If Lennart Poettering "adopted" varlink, he seems to have done so from members of his own team ("our team") who created varlink and who are also fellow co-creators of systemd.
[1] https://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html#faqs
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rrpjYD373A
The FOSDEM speakers are sent emails to review and approve the video recording (this involves rudimentary stuff like reviewing the start and end time, if the automated system didn't get it right; choosing one of the three audio channels etc). The recordings that have been reviewed and approved would be online by now.
Hehe, I'm eagerly waiting for this one as well as I'd be extremely happy to replace some hack to run docker images with `systemd-nspawn` served from the nix store.
Appreciate the .vtt files
Easier to preview content before downloading
What saddens me a lot is that a lot of talks become low level beginner introduction fast food talks.
I think that it was better when most talks were 45 mins to 1h with deeper more advanced and senior content.
At the same time, with the overcrowded aspect, it becomes harder to socialize and meet people really involved in maintaining open source projects in my opinion. There are a lot lot lot more "users" on both sides (visitors and speakers) than what it used to be 10 years ago.
As an example, in a majority of talks there was no time for questions and very little chatter between and around talks. It is like walking in big city, everyone is busy running around.
And questions and comments after talks was what was bringing the most value to the event. Compared to just watch a recording of a talk.
Agreed, this year was a bit light on questions.
OTOH, 80% of the reason I go to talks is to see if the person has interesting things to say and grab them after the talk for a chat. I.e. it sucks for the remote experience, but I think for on-site it's fine to just talk more.
Gets harder if you consider the talks the main attraction, but I really see them more as hooks to talk to people about interesting topics.
Glad to have returned after missing out on FOSDEM for a while. However, I agree with OP on that undeniable success leading to heavy crowding. I also missed some hacker hardware stands, there were very few this year.
I always enjoyed chatting with people demoing SDR/small cool hardware hacks as a refreshing break from whatever high-tech presentation room I got stuck in for half a day :-)
It would almost be good to ... have a bigger campus.
Tough luck on that though.
> One of my personal highlights of FOSDEM 2026 was a wonderfully simple yet brilliant idea by the Mozilla Foundation: giving away free cookies.
They had an opportunity there to restore the "Cookies are delicious delicacies" message [1] in a more appropriate context, but it seems that's not the sign they went with.
[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=213186
They do this every year since a while :)
It was fun but indeed, I spent a lot of time waiting in line for talks and in some rooms I couldn't even enter at all.
For talks which will obviously be popular, go to the talk before it even if it's not as interesting. It's not common to have two super-popular talks in a row in the same room.
Yeah ofc but I also like to walk around, I might just camp in a room next year.
This year they said they avoided making single–project rooms. These are the ones people camped in the most, I think.
Is that right? There were devrooms for GCC, Go, LLVM, Nix, Plan 9, Python and many more.
F.ex. they didn't do postgresql and other DBs separately but instead just had a databases room.
Just repeating what they said from the closing ceremony.
That is how it's supposed to be. You can watch the talks at home at any time but the opportunity to meet random yet like-minded people from all over Europe is unique.
On my side, I had the feeling that there was less room/talk full to the point you can't enter compared to previous years.
Except in the H building.
Agree, felt a little less packed than before. H building was brutal though.
Not the same experience of course, but I think you can watch the presentations you've missed https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/streaming/
Indeed! It's the 3-4x times I'm going to FOSDEM so I'm mainly looking to connect with people doing cool stuff tbh, otherwise I can just watch stuff online for sure.
I watched at home and drank Belgian beer in the afternoon.
I hope you didn't get a hangover. They have great tasting beers but put too much sugar in them.
That’s a sweeping generalization for hundreds of varieties of Belgian beers lol.
Is the sugar fermented away? Definitely heavier than English beers.
With the car? I go by train, and then either by bike or tram. Much easier
> Like every year, I decided to travel to FOSDEM by car. It is not the most relaxed option, but it comes with one very important advantage: arriving early enough to secure a parking spot directly on campus. That also means the journey starts very early in the morning, long before the city fully wakes up.
Curiously backwards. That's one way of reframing a disadvantage as an advantage. The train connection seems to be 3h15m to 3h30m from Neuss train station to FOSDEM. A single connection for the long-distance train in Cologne, the rest is local public transport within Brussels.
(The OP may been /s without me realizing.)
The OP goes on to genuinely talk about the advantage of being able to leave when they desire (usually only attending day 1), and the observation that their leaving early was worthwhile, as they were first in line to access the car parking area —- so it would seem very much to not be /s.
Which probably also relates to DB pricing.
Being flexible with DB is expensive. Getting somewhere at all is generally cheap. Getting somewhere at a reasonable time is usually ok~ish priced. But being able to just take any train? €€€
And reliable. This is why I (near the border) drive across the border and take the train through Belgium.
https://belgiantrain.be for finding trains and tickets to/from the nearest station, Etterbeek (or use another station if you want to take the tram, where you just swipe a bank card). The ticket is valid for any train going to your destination. For those <26yo, the price is discounted. Welkenraedt is an intercity station with free parking that goes directly to Brussels, in case that happens to be near to someone reading this
Same with the Netherlands. Sadly no intercity stations have free parking but Nuth is on the path north and the highway exit basically ends in its parking lot. After a few stops you can switch to an intercity to Amsterdam
Almost everyone I spoke to this year had issues with the trains into Belgium. Cancellations, delays, strikes.
Strikes are normal when politicians wants to steal pensions.
In Europe it repeats every year. Politicians try to steal pensions, workers strike, politicians back off. In America I think the workers would roll over. I wish the workers good luck and I will tolerate the temporary transport disruption if that's the cost of not being America.
Trains coming from the east via Berlin->Cologne were significantly disrupted.
As usual, there is hardly a day that doesn't happen, and it got worse this year as they finally started some repairs on critical routes, suppressing many alternatives, or average speeds.
Was the Eurostar delayed, does anyone know?
Eurostar was fine for me. Getting to the Eurostar within Germany apparently sucked for some. But I took a later train and didn't have issues there either.
My experience was good: on my way in Paris -> Brussels arrived 10min early, and on my way out Brussels -> Paris I had ~15min delay (apparently because Police had to board the train before Brussels).
Not for me.
No, I don't think Eurostar was affected at all.
Worked for me from Amsterdam.
Brussels is my native city: I grew up there. If you're at peak traffic hours (8-10am and 3-6pm) during weekdays then, depending where to where you go, there can be really bad traffic jams.
But outside of these hours the car is simply much more convenient. I lived in Brussels for 42 years and did everything that wasn't walking distance by car (very mostly in the pre- Uber days). You simply know where the parking spots are and it's too convenient to have your own car when you come out of the restaurant, without to have to worry about the last bus / last tram / getting mugged.
TFA's author went up early in the morning: he's dodging traffic jams.
For example FOSDEM if I'm concerned there'd be no spot? I'd park on the other side of the Bois de la Cambre and then walk to the campus.
Bicycling? It's nice when you don't have a nice bicycle. Otherwise it's gone in 60 seconds. I also don't see many people bicycling when the weather is bad and, well, let's get real: it rains a huge freaking lot in Brussels.
P.S: FOSDEM is happening in the Ixelles district, adjacent to the Uccle district (the Bois de la Cambre is on both districts). These are the two poshest, classiest, most expensive districts of Brussels with very few high-rises and very few soviet-style buildings with lots of apartments (these exists but in other districts). It's as if FOSDEM was taking place in Beverly Hills. In these posh areas there are parking spots.
Brussels cycling infrastructure has improved a _lot_ in the last decade and the number of cyclists is growing every year while the number of households with a car is decreasing every year (less than half of the househols have a car now).
As they say, there's no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing. The weather in the Netherlands is not very different and it doesn't stop them.
Also the public transportation is by far the best of the country, but that doesn't say a lot.
Except for this year with the public transport strikes in Belgium... But I'm not going to waste more than half of two days driving next time.
"But in the end, FOSDEM is not just about talks. It is about meeting people, reconnecting with friends, and having spontaneous conversations that no video stream can fully replace."
I don't go to the talks because they are recorded, it's more about meeting friends around a coffee or a beer.
Maybe in the future, we will have more tables for hacking like at CCC...
> Maybe in the future, we will have more tables for hacking like at CCC...
Are they construction a new building for that? Or making used of the unused floorspace in the U building?
I suspect it would be true of most conferences or events like this. The presentations are mostly excuses to justify the event and perhaps to help gather and identify the people sharing the same topics.
FOSDEM is simply not CCC. They are different events run by different people with different visions. If you want CCC you can (with good luck or a group affiliation) go to CCC. Or EMF — Electromagnetic Field.
BTW there were rooms in the past (2005 if I remember) where people could sit with their laptops and hack around.
There were at CCC in 2005, too, now it's all allocated to assembly groups.
"all allocated to assembly groups"
And they are all quickly booked as well, if you are not there when the registration process open, you can't have a table.
Registering an assembly is trivial, but yea you definitely want to associate with one just so you don't have to carry your bag around all day.
gyptazy provided a recap of the FOSDEM conference in Brussels, Belgium and it sounds great again. But his concerns about scaling are real and so, also I had often no chance to get a place for a talk. Wondering if it's still worth to get onsite next year or just to watch the recordings afterwards.
Hello from a packed devroom.
You can't attend all 30+ tracks at once anyway, you need to see recordings afterwards anyway if you are remotely interested in consuming the conference. I'd say the experience is just as much about meeting the people behind all the internet handles, getting into a full lecture room one talk in advance and listening in to something you otherwise wouldn't, join something bigger than email lists and matrix rooms, it's a unique wibe you can't find anywhere else.
I wonder if it naturally regulates itself in the way that people who get fed up by the queues don't come back the next year. You can definitely start by adding measures to limit the capacity or whatnot, but in both cases you exclude a certain part of the potential participants. I think I'd rather keep the wibe and ensure people can at least experience it once, than start gatekeeping.
Also, the fries are good.
The most important realization about FOSDEM is really:
There's no way you can fully experience it or do it optimal.
It's really about making sure you get value out of it, listen to some interesting talks and meet some people.
It is been years since from my last time, however already about 10 years ago, it used to be either stick to a room, or stay close to a door and leave 10 minutes earlier, to try to get a spot in another talk, equally staying close to the door.
I was sitting behind you as you wrote this comment.
I just wanted to tell you that.
It's about collecting stickers.
It‘s about getting a selfie with the blue PostgreSQL elephant wandering around campus. :-)
It's about meeting people who go to FOSDEM.
It's about the friends you make when collecting stickers.
Sounds a lot like McMurdo
The number of times I heard this joke: Oh, nobody goes to FOSDEM anymore, it's way too crowded. But it's true. They have a serious overcrowding problem, with the queue outside longer than the number of seats, while the room is already packed.
The app had nice indicators of where the overcrowding was, though. It pushed me to less popular talks, where I discovered some hidden gems. I also came home with a big list of recordings to check out.
Scale has been an issue for years. The last time I went I just hung out in one DevRoom for a chunk of the conference. Running from room to room tends to be an exercise in frustration. There are a lot of people and the campus isn't that straightforward to navigate.
"the campus isn't that straightforward to navigate."
I got lost several times, in the previous editions I remember there were clear signs at every level to guide you to the rooms...
> Not every open source project exists to solve geopolitical problems, and not every contributor arrives with a policy agenda. FOSDEM has always thrived on its diversity of motivations, and maintaining that balance will be increasingly challenging.
It’s not just the FOSS scene but there is an increasing crowd (mostly on the internet) of “everything is political”. Honestly I’m not sure what will happen in the coming years but personally I try to take a step back and detach myself from all these things. Some (even here on HN) call this as privilege but then so be it I value my mental health more.
The entire idea of F/OSS itself is political, and was very radical. We're just accustomed to it now, so it's not "political", in other words, it's not "controversial". Perhaps F/OSS is -more- political than other spaces because we organize around projects? Here, and on Reddit, we see the fallout of drama all the time in various F/OSS communities over disagreeing over policies. That's... politics.
Unless you happen to live alone and interact with no one, basically every single interaction is undergirded by policies determined by humans. Politics. A computer/phone being built that is purchasable for legal tender, charged by electricity being fed into our homes, where we can send packets in the air, underground and across the world, doesn't happen by magic. It's literally the result of politics.
"Detaching oneself" really just means "not paying attention to politics". And it's a free world to do so, especially for mental health reasons. It's definitely not healthy to be tapped into news/current events all the time and I have to take breaks myself. But for some people, they can't really detach when their literal existence is deemed "political". This is what people refer to when they say it's privileged to detach.
Side Note: criticism of "detaching" is not referring to things like detaching for mental health. Internet trolls aside, that's a strawman argument. What it's referring to is the kind of people who say "oh, I'm just apolitical" or "tech is apolitical, it's just code", when really the status quo is in their favor and they have zero need to ever think about political issues. They would certainly not be "apolitical" if they were being banned from entering public bathrooms or being banned from contributing to F/OSS projects on the basis of their skin color!
I grew up poor enough that my classmates called me "Tramp". Hand-me-downs so threadbare they could pass for actual rubbish, couldn't afford deodorant or adequate dental hygiene; the works. The 10-year-old £5 computer that barely wheezed into life was my escape into a world that genuinely didn't care about any of that.
On the internet (1hr per day, courtesy of the local library), I was just the words on the screen. Nobody knew I was poor. Nobody knew I was weird-looking. Nobody knew anything except whether my code worked and whether my arguments made sense. That pseudonymity wasn't a limitation of the technology... it was the most liberating feature I'd ever experienced.
When people say "everything is political" and "detaching is privilege", I feel like they're describing a completely different internet to the one that saved me. The privilege wasn't being able to ignore politics- the privilege was finally finding a space where the hierarchies that had crushed me in the physical world simply didn't exist.
Bringing identity and real-world political causes into these spaces doesn't make them more inclusive- it recreates the very social hierarchies we'd escaped. When you insist I must care about your cause, acknowledge your identity, or pledge allegiance to your political framework just to contribute code or discuss technology, you're making the space less meritocratic, not more.
The early internet let us be judged solely on the merit of our ideas. That was radical. That was revolutionary. For some of us, that was the only place we'd ever experienced actual equality of opportunity.
When you demand these spaces become "politically aware", what I hear is: "your refuge wasn't good enough, and now you need to care about my problems too." But this was the one place where I didn't have to perform social status, where I didn't have to prove I belonged based on anything other than what I knew and what I could build.
I'm not saying the world's problems don't matter. I'm saying there used to be spaces where we could focus on intellectual puzzles and technical problems without importing every societal conflict. And frankly, for those of us who were outcasts in the physical world, losing that feels like losing the only place we ever truly belonged.
Fwiw, I 100% agree with this. All of a sudden the constant judging is there, it's seeping into the once clean, apolitical world-of-mind. It started on the big tech platforms, the new weary giants of flesh and steel, but it's overflowing into our hacker-minded spaces as well now.
Like US families torn between 2 sides of their politics, they can't even have normal dinners together anymore. They can't communicate without judging, it's an illness, they've been weaponized against each other.
Well, it's hard to break bread with someone who you fundamentally disagree about things like humans rights issues with. Family or not. You don't just skip over that, and in fact why should you? Having blood relations means you have to sit and eat with someone who thinks you or people you know shouldn't exist or shouldn't be allowed to have the same rights as other people? I'm very glad that we've normalized not glossing over this kind of stuff anymore, because of "family".
"our hacker-minded spaces"
Spaces full of people.
"once clean, apolitical world-of-mind"
This only ever existed for select few people.
> Well, it's hard to break bread with someone who you fundamentally disagree about things like humans rights issues with.
It's actually not. It's very easy to get along with people, even those from whom we have vastly differing moral axioms, if we only try. Sadly these days many people are disinterested in trying, believing (wrongly) that they will make the world a better place if they sow more division.
Why try to get along with someone you have vastly different moral axioms to?
It used to work quite well. Perhaps together you can think of a cause to the rift, and try to actively fight it instead of each other. Start with commonalities, not differences. I think it’s important to, at the very least, never stop trying.
How extreme of moral axiom differences should we tolerate?
The question assumes we know what someone believes before we've spoken to them. That's the actual problem here, people are being excluded based on assumed beliefs rather than demonstrated behaviour.
Opinions evolve through exposure to different viewpoints, not through isolation from them. The homophobes and racists of the 80s who changed their minds didn't do so because they were shut out of communities - they changed because they were forced to actually interact with the people they'd made assumptions about. That contact broke down the assumptions.
When you exclude someone pre-emptively because you've decided what they must believe, you've eliminated the possibility of that evolution happening. You've also replicated the exact mechanism that made 80s bigotry so pernicious: denying participation based on identity or assumed characteristics rather than actual conduct.
Everyone thinks they're right. The racists thought they were right. The homophobes thought they were right. You think you're right. I think I'm right. That's why behaviour-based boundaries matter more than belief-based ones. Judge people on what they actually do in the space, not what you assume they think.
If your moral framework requires everyone to already agree with you before they're allowed to participate, you're not building a community - you're enforcing an orthodoxy. And orthodoxies don't evolve, they just calcify.
Let me answer you with 2 other questions:
Is this line of thinking going to make things better for future generations or is it not?
How important is it to work on defining this boundary, compared to working towards a less polarized society?
How can society become less polarised if we normalise an extremely wide spectrum of different moral axioms? To reduce polarisation, people with extremist moral axioms must stop having them, which can't happen if extremist moral axioms are accepted.
For one, I think that the people you have put the "extreme" label on, are not as extreme as you think they are, and indeed could be quite agreeable when you'd seek them out and sit down with them over tea and try to communicate with them with more nuance than a 160 char message can deliver.
Yes, you will be able to find examples that confirm your statement, but they are an exceedingly small minority, probably despised (almost) as much by their "own group" (as far as people actually feel part of a group) as they are by you.
I believe it is the (incentives of) the (social)media and the bots that have made you believe otherwise, over time and in small steps.
The people I put the "extreme" label on believe that it's okay to kill millions of people in order to increase your own strength.
I'd love to have a beer with you, we could be at this all night haha.
I don't know if you notice what you're doing, but you're turning a low stakes / no confrontation situation into a high stakes / confrontational situation for no discernible benefit.
This type of self destructive behavior may seem worthwhile in the moment, but in the long run it doesn't bring any benefits, because you have to fight the people you're declaring war against and if the list of enemies is long enough, you're almost certainly guaranteed to lose against one of them.
Because they may be your neighbors, your colleagues? Because they're going to the same third place as you, whatever that might be?
I don't show it but honestly I also find it hard not to attribute the negative consequences (partially in Brussels funnily enough) of your preferred policies to people like you. Sometimes it gets hard to hide that.
Your reading of "politics" seems quite narrow. Creating a place free of social status, hierarchies and with equal opportunity? That's 100% politics.
If that were the goal it might be politics. If its a side effect then its not.
If it's just a side effect then you don't mind if we get rid of it, right?
Anonymity was a given in the beginnings of the internet, and we now need to fight hard for any remaining form of it. Your post makes me longing for my past, whereas GPs post makes me longing for our future.
The virtual world(s) felt like equality of opportunity because everything was a blank canvas, or some canvas that barely had any fingerprints on it. For a lot of people the internet currently consists out of WhatsApp, Facebook, and Google News. So tell me, what is truly radical, what is revolutionary anymore?
So if someone wants to close your local library you wouldn't have a problem? If someone decides that you can't have a £5 computer, you have to subscribe to a computer service?
Read this and tell me free software is not politics
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
You're right that free software philosophy is political, and I benefited enormously from that. But there's a crucial difference between "this tool has political implications" and "you must actively engage with every political cause to participate." I could contribute to GNU projects without Stallman asking about my views beyond software freedom, the code compiled or it didn't, the patch worked or it didn't. The philosophy was clear, but participation didn't require political conformity beyond that shared goal. What I'm pushing back against is the insistence that every space must become a venue for every political discussion, where "everything is political" becomes "you must actively care about my specific causes in the way I care about them, right now, in this space."
The beauty of libraries and cheap computers wasn't just that they existed through political decisions, it's that I could use them without performing any particular political identity beyond their core function. If libraries close or computing becomes subscription-only, I'll fight that because access matters. But I can defend access whilst wanting spaces where the primary focus remains the technical work. The right to read is worth defending. So is the right to just read, without every reading group becoming a political caucus.
I'm not describing just the internet. I'm describing the nature of the world around us, both in meatspace and on in the internet in the context of this discussion. As regrettable as it is (I mean, who doesn't hate politicians?), it's just all politics, regardless if one chooses to detach or not.
That pseudonymity you're describing still exists in many spaces to this day. I have no idea what many (most?) of the contributors on F/OSS projects look like, or anything about them unless they voluntarily divulged it. You don't have to "pledge allegiance to political frameworks", not for any F/OSS project that I'm aware of.
What people do have to do more now is treat other people with respect, which the old internet very much did not do well. There are many people who can code, so projects actually don't have to keep around people who can't conduct themselves nicely.
"When you demand these spaces become ..."
"Demand" is a strawman argument. What changed overall is that people bring themselves into these spaces, not just a pseudonymous username. That comes with different expectations for conduct. Do you miss the flamewars of the past?
"where I didn't have to prove I belonged"
What F/OSS projects do you have to do this for? Basically every project I've contributed to had nothing like that.
"... there used to be spaces where we could focus on intellectual puzzles and technical problems without importing every societal conflict"
While I can empathize with this, I'm not sure if I entirely agree with this recollection of the internet. People could still be cruel to anyone who happened to reveal anything about themselves, as humans tend to do, that was "atypical", shall we say. I don't see why you still can't focus on technical problems, because unless you're a moderator, nobody is forcing you to comment on anything except technical discussions.
Just because the idea of F/OSS software is/was relatively radical and a certain type of political act when applied in certain situations, does not mean that it necessarily needs to concern itself with any other political act. After all, all acts are political, right?
To extend your world picture just one more step - for those people whose "existance is political", a F/OSS world that does not concern itself with irrelevant politics provides that very haven where only the merit of ideas is considered.
I would go further and claim that anyone who sees themselves as "apolitical" just basically thinks their own opinion is the only true way to see things "rationally" (and as such "fact" and not an opinion; nothing to be "political" about), and everyone else is just plain wrong/mistaken. Since they're not ready to admit this to themselves and others, they hide behind the "apolitical" label. Otherwise they would see that their own opinion is a "political statement" on equal basis as others. It doesn't even make a difference if you voice it or not.
This strategy works poorly to avoid conflict and friction (life), since one just shifts conflict to reappear elsewhere. Hence the often claimed need to self-isolate "for mental health" to avoid getting in contact with... positions such as one's own, and half-suppressed anger at all those that just don't see what is RIGHT.
Hint: It doesn't work.
This closely matches the way a few of my "apolitical" friends behave.
They mostly think their opinion is the right one, and others are just flailing around not understanding the real "objective" "truth". But they never spent more than a minute thinking things through and re-evaluating their biases and "objective reality"...
They then spend quite some time ranting about things that are obviously political, but on the same breath say they are proud not to vote...
One can recognize the importance of defining processes for how decisions pertaining to a soceity are being made, and adhering to those, while, at the same time, trying not to judge views other than yours, or simply trying not to engage too much in debates pertaining to that process. In other words, you can choose not to let politics seep to much into your identify.
I am a hacker, a baker of breads, a father, a debater, a thinker. Period. Not libertarian or whatever. My ideas sometimes are more like a democrat, sometimes more republican. I often like Bernie Sanders, and Schwarzenegger would be a nice, good, kind republican president imho. I don't like being seen as a part of any of these groups. I enjoy discussing reasons for "the 2 party" (but not really 2 party-) system much more than discussing which is morally superior.
This, to me, is a valid stance. For some it is the way to stay sane.
Some views deserve to be judged. I've met people who genuinely believe there is nothing wrong with killing millions of people just because they aren't like you. Most people are horrified by that idea, but he isn't, he finds it quite normal, as normal as taking an umbrella because it's raining. I think it's okay to judge that.
I agree. I just want to tell you that those people are an exceedingly small minority.
To deny another human being the rights you enjoy is imho the same as denying yourself those rights (because I, as a 3rd person, see both people as equal, and otherwise there is a paradox). This is the basis of our justice system, we "put people away" in cages, and in some places even kill them, because they believed their right to swing their fist does not end at someone else's nose. But presumably they would not enjoy a fist to the nose themselves.
But does it mean "100% open borders"? (notice the 100%) Should those rights pertain to (higher) animals? (notice the "higher")
There is nuance to explore, there are many ways to be a humanist. I.e., dumping mosquito nets in a mosquito rich area may be seen as helping, but not to local mosquito net makers (and thus you are not helping anyone in the long term, because the mosquito net makers are all bankrupt).
There is always nuance. And there are always exceptions, and your statements generalize exceptions to much larger groups, demanding action on a scale that is unwarranted, imho. Both sides are responding vividly to exceptions, to lack of nuance, to 160 character statements in all caps.
I've met an exceedingly small number of people who state the worldview outright, but I've met a much larger number of people whose actions are only consistent with that internal worldview.
That is thus all solely your interpretation. I think it is very dangerous to make assumptions about people's internal worldview and judging people on that assumption. In fact I think you have just expressed quite well what I object against, precisely.
Is it ever appropriate to model another human's internal processes?
>The entire idea of F/OSS itself is political, and was very radical.
Political and radical as it pertains to software, not whatever the grievance of the day to virtue signal over is.
FOSS projects are tired of the incessant US-centric, champagne socialist politicking destroying their communities. Thankfully peak nonsense is behind us. You no longer have power.
>But for some people, they can't really detach when their literal existence is deemed "political".
Everyone's existence is "political." It's a privileged position to think your existence is "political" while others are not.
Why do you think that politics has to relate to the grievance of the day? Every interaction between two people is political. You can pretend it's not, if you're happy with the status quo and seeking to defuse movements that seek change, because you don't like change. This is an indicator of privilege because only people who benefit from the status quo seek to prevent it from changing.
with AI we have entered capitalistic computing, where it's the scale of computing that makes it political (before, it was a clever idea that brought the political thing, like MP3, encryption, etc.). As it is massive scale (think 2GWatt data centers), I'm afraid the poor little FOSS guy won't be able to be as relevant as before. It's not David against Goliath anymore, it's FOSS against billions of zombies.
I happen to be one of these FOSS guys though and as you do, I think it's better to stay off to keep my mental health; else it makes me feel powerless. How sad: 20 years ago I thought the fight was possible.
The change was the rise of "cloud", with saas, paas and even iaas. The world no longer ran software they controlled (even if it were proprietary you still controlled windows NT and Office 95) on hardware they owned.
This comment has so many statements framed by a lot of specific political premises that not everyone agrees on. It's hard to talk about political neutrality without going to the next higher meta language where we view our own interests alongside others' independent interests more abstractly.
A lot of the problems people see with OSS are a result of "free/libre" having been successful at training OSS enthusiasts to embrace commensalist thinking, bomb-shelter monasticism, and to reject the consumer but then complain when the consumer has to turn to the network-effect entrenched platforms while other businesses lack the tools to compete in open networks that were never built.
Anyway, check out https://prizeforge.com
>It’s not just the FOSS scene but there is an increasing crowd (mostly on the internet) of “everything is political”.
Judging from HN we are pass that already. Absolute Peak of it was 2014 - 2017. But I guess this is a new trend especially in EUR.
The trend is global and inherent to online psychological coupling and self-selection bias. The longer we go without healthy information spaces, the more the population will regress.
There does however seem to be a "free/libre" vs open source rift along the Atlantic ridge, and it is being wedged apart by the US government flirting with a return to isolationism mixed with bullying and self-enforced credible threat geopolitics.
It is really counter-productive for Europeans to think American OSS people are monolithic with US tech giants and the US federal government. Nonetheless, pluralism is good, and innovation will win, so I suppose it's just another hairpin in the game.
I for one am getting pretty sick of it. FOSS is by nature apolitical, pre-competitive and for me has always been an intellectual exercise. This is the only way it can power Chinese clouds, Azure, AWS and GCP, and the many EU sovereign systems we're going to see. To me it's a place to find kind people who are enthusiastic about tech, like me.
Now I find myself judged when using Nix, genAI, Blockchain, Omarchy (and by extension even Framework), Podcasting 2.0 related things, Centos Stream... It doesn't end. So many people that divide the world in good/bad, them/us. I'm tuning out tbh.
(as an aside, I wish I could have some indication of how polarized the voting here on HN is ;))
I think that’s a very idealistic view of FOSS that is detached from reality. In the late 90s and early 00s we were fighting the crypto wars, making DeCSS illegal, DMCA, EUCD. There was a lot of infighting between free software and open source proponents. Many FSF campaigns were very political. I got bashed by some other FOSS people I knew in ~2006 for using and contributing to CentOS because it was Red Hat-based (evil empire or whatever).
The difference is that social media is amplifying things a lot more and there is a culture of destroying people in public (made easier by social media amplification).
It’s really the same issue as outside FOSS, social media creates stronger bubbles, more extremes, more grifters, and more amplification of crap.
What is your definition of politics?
It's about governance of society, about how decisions concerning society are being made. About what processes we adhere to. About agreeing to follow those process together, instead of resorting to primitive things like violence.
then FOSS is political. It's about processes we adhere to and how decisions are made. Microsoft makes a decision to ban the ICC from Windows and has a process for this. Linux has a different process where they can't make that decision because it's impossible.
"Concerning society" is important here. We do not codify the use of FOSS in any laws. At most we have decided that people can make up licenses and that we agree to adhere to the terms of any creator stated in licenses. We don't say what those terms must be or how we come to those terms.
I just like some terms more than others, they work for me, I think they make the world a better, more interesting place. Where is the politics in that?
Your comment reads to me like it will derail the conversation about FOSDEM into one about (American) politics and HN's policy regarding political stories.
Was that your intention?
While tools and software itself is not political, the people behind it are. eg. When CEOs and founders and project leads leverage their audience for politics, then their tools are absolutely a political choice. Be it DHH’s latest fasho ramblings or every time you do ‘swift build’ - Tim Cook takes a selfie with a sex offender.
But let’s refocus on FOSDEM and the mission of libre software to allow us to exist without “corporate oversight” or to just build, with tools made by other humans.
> When CEOs and founders and project leads leverage their audience for politics, then their tools are absolutely a political choice. Be it DHH’s latest fasho ramblings or every time you do ‘swift build’ - Tim Cook takes a selfie with a sex offender.
I don't follow. Are you implying that by using Ruby on Rails or Omarchy one is fasho aligned ? Or that people that use Swift somehow support sex offenders ?
More like... when they use their platforms to promote whatever, you helping those platforms move forward is essentially helping them push the whatever forward. I don't get why is this so hard to understand. Unfortunately, we've gotten to a place where picking a tool is also an expression of your support for the politics of the people/corps behind it.
Sure sounds that way.
I don't think your examples are comparable. DHH is (/was?) the face of ruby on rails and basecamp, whereas Cook is just the latest person at the helm of a tremendously large (personnel-wise) company someone else built. There are only 2 relevant phone types to consider, and please don't tell me Google/Samsung are morally superior to Apple. Even for ruby on rails, hundreds (thousands ?) of people have been contributing to it. It's not really "owned" by DHH anymore, and it's 21 years old, well before these rants.
And not to compare badness, but DHH is ranting publicly on his blog about the projected % of white people in Norway in 2096 and quoting white supremacists in his lamentation about the UK not being more white. Blaming the increasingly totalitarian actions the UK has been taking on immigrants and not the literal lawmakers setting those policies is certainly an opinion to hold. It's a whole lot more in your face.
I do agree about Omarchy linux though- that's still very closely associated with DHH and I'm not touching that with a 39.5ft pole, let alone before getting into technical issues. I was honestly pretty disappointed to see the typical dev personalities online cover Omarchy linux despite the crap DHH has been spewing on his blog.
The immigrant policies in the UK and the USA enjoy widespread support. This is not authoritarianism imposed on the population by the lawmakers — the population are craving authoritarianism (on other people besides themselves).
By politics, do you mean politics. Because of course OSS has always been political.
Generally people afraid of politics are using the term as an empty space for some form of specific politics they want to run away from. In which case, why not just say what you mean.
In the end, it’s all about socializing.
The contrast of this text is really awful, how does anyone even read it without reader mode?
It looks okay to me. The links are a bit too low contrast yes, but I think the normal text is black. The bigger issue is likely the font weight, it must be at like 200/300.
Isn't it black on white? I can't see a color specified anywhere other than for <a>
For me, it's a thin font in various shades from black to light grey, on a pure white background. I'm with the comment above, it's unreadable.
An alternative: FluConf https://2026.fluconf.online/
> The quality of the talks was high
Maybe I was in the wrong rooms, but the quality of the talks were really low.. Most of them were advertising one kind of service or another.
"Most of them were advertising one kind of service or another."
10y ago we had the issue with one of the talks in the IOT devroom which was very "corporate" with one presentation turning into the promotion of a proprietary product.
Fosdem just has a huge amount of talks. Some are great, most aren't.
you don't go there for the talks. You go to meet other people who go.
Please leave feedback on talks (good and bad), it is useful for helping shape the program for next year
specifically to feedback@fosdem.org
At the closing, they requested that you send them any feedback about any part of the event
Also on each talks page on the website you can find a "Submit Feedback" link for feedback on that specific talk
As a US citizen, when I see the phrase "European digital sovereignty," I'm a bit concerned that our OSS enthusiast and activist allies in that geography are learning to associate American OSS with American tech companies and US government. This could deepen the old free/libre vs open source divide that seems to have polarized along the separation by the Atlantic ocean. If so, in a time where Americans may be soon head-to-head with a runaway tyrannical government, our EU allies will be busy retreating into free/libre commensalist thinking that seem tunnel-visioned on using government funding to escape MS Word, something that is going to be the last thing on their minds if actual sovereignty concerns emerge.
The more general goal will remain to protect all individual freedoms from all tyrannical governments, not to depend on them. It will remain to use better information technology to enhance the functioning of all governments and to create healthy competition in all markets to protect consumer choice. American OSS has not forgotten this one bit. Our country is just having a moment, and it won't help if EU OSS participation writes us off as casualties while EU OSS focuses on "uniquely European" solutions.
I don't think anyone is confused about American OSS and American corporations run amok with wealth accumulation and regulatory capture. It's a European conference held at a time when governments are waking up to the realization that foreign-owned proprietary software is a bad idea, and the idea of "digital sovereignty" has been around for a bit and did not originate at FOSDEM. The governments also seem to understand that OSS helps with transparency and minimizing costs by investing into a commons (though the message bears repeating; FSFE, EDRI and such do a good job getting it out), so hopefully they'll stick with that and not replicate the US model.
"the idea of 'digital sovereignty' has been around for a bit and did not originate at FOSDEM."
I would say it is around since the creation of the networked computer.
Remember the debate on about centralized mainframes vs home computers?
> I don't think anyone is confused about American OSS and American corporations run amok...
You literally just lumped it all together, exactly the fallacy I'm voicing my concern about.
> foreign-owned proprietary
OSS is global. "Foreign owned" is relative. If Americans reject "European" open source, it would make zero sense.
> the US model
What even is "the US model?" The things that are being described as "American" or "European" here are not inherently national.
How did I lump both together when I specifically called them out separately, lol.
Everybody understands OSS/free software is global (though copyright/left is still subject to export controls and other laws.) No question about that. And I was specifically talking about proprietary software there, you even copied that in your reply...Proprietary software is bad; foreign-owned is even worse, like the EU has learned recently when Microsoft cuts your email short, for example.
The "US model" is obviously big monopolies or duopolies run unchecked, allowed to buy, prevent and starve competition, then seeking regulatory capture to secure a moat. That is what people know, for better or for worse. No laymen knows the FSF, or what that guy in Arkansas in the xkcd is doing for the digital infrastructure.
I think the main challenge for Europe will be to manage those public investments in an effective way for people's benefit. As far as I know, there are few precedents, and maybe nothing of that scale. China pulls off of open/free software significantly, mostly to avoid US proprietary software, but to my knowledge they don't give much/anything back. So it seems challenging, but I'm also excited for how/if they pull it off.
By the way, I donate to both US and EU free software and digital rights organizations. It was not my intention to nurture your conception of a divide, if that is what you took from my comment.
> The more general goal will remain to protect all individual freedoms from all tyrannical governments, not to depend on them.
This is more of an American pov and will probably be a disconnect for Europeans. Their governments don't screw them as much, so they probably don't see them as tyrannical. Those governments investing in proprietary software to move away from other proprietary software would be a mistake; so government investment into free/open source should be seen as a win, not something to shy away from in the name of individual freedom.
> How did I lump both together when I specifically called them out separately, lol.
Dude, "American OSS and American corporations" is simple conjunction, a union, treating two things as one so that you can make a single predicate statement about them. If you mean to make separate statements about the two things, maybe don't group them into the same sentence phrase?
I asked you not to group these things together. If this provokes you to begin regurgitating "free/libre" ideology all over again, you obviously think that being asked to separate American OSS and American corporations is somehow incompatible with OSS or "free/libre". American OSS marched in front of Microsoft to demand refunds. Get it right.
At this point you're clearly misconstruing my statements, and/or have some problems with reading comprehension. Your others comments don't leave much to be positive about, either.
For what it’s worth I’m a neutral and I was confused by the way you worded / structured the original reply
It's a European event.
You would have been able to see this by looking at a graph of my karma against the hour of day. There's truly an ideological dispersion across the Atlantic.
OSS and FOSS are global, not American or EU or anything. The geopolitical situation is on another plane. FOSS can and will be used as a tool for strategic autonomy, for better and for worse.
Why would one at this very moment look with suspicion at a FOSS contributor for the sole reason (s)he's American?
1.) it's quiet clear the European sovereignity is a pitch to get resources into the OS eco system. 2.) it's very easy: after governments companies ans users will follow as os proofed to work. 3.) this is not us vs eu,.it is just us vs. The rest of the world. Canada and Mexico are threatened by Trumpy as well and located on another side of the Atlantic and probably their government are interested into OS as well. 4.) As there is not an os business model of US will work , money and users will be else where starting in Europe. It will be easier for Open Source somewhere else. 5.) so this is my last bit: your comment sounds like American don't want to protest against Trump because it is too dangerous. Well, that's the result as 50% of people voted for Trump. In your scene: Less resources for open source in the us
> your comment sounds like American don't want to protest against Trump because it is too dangerous
At this time, we are still openly committed to the 2nd amendment in defense of the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 6th and so on. I am encouraging others to participate in open-carry demonstrations to make it clear to the authoritarians that they will not get the intimidating optics of an unopposed crackdown against a helpless crowd that they want. Personally, I grew up shooting things, so handling bootlickers will be natural if it comes to it.
Technically enabled solutions to better communicate, organize, and represent the will of the people would help a lot. Bomb-shelter thinking will not help much. If the US devolves into a Russian style authoritarian state, one where I will no longer be welcomed off the plane, the EU will have more to worry about than Windows. My ideas on the technically enabled side are complex but sound, so I encourage any interested in doing full stack Rust to get a hold of me by clicking links. I'll be finishing up some shader programming and feedback rendering today as the next piece of my strategy.
> the EU will have more to worry about than Windows
The US can, right now, crash pretty much the entire western industry/economy by disconnecting their digital services.
The US already threatens the western world with that power. They already use it.
Of course the EU has to care about that. The reason they accepted the dependency was that for a long time they were looking up to the US, and couldn't imagine that the US could become an enemy in the space of a few weeks.
Now the US has proven that they could realistically go from this state that the western world trusted to declaring war to allies in a matter of weeks. Of course everybody is scared.
The EU will have more to worry about than Windows, but it also has to worry about Windows. Trump banned the head of the ICC from Microsoft, successfully disrupting their prosecution of America, via pure software means.
> At this time, we are still openly committed to the 2nd amendment in defense of the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 6th and so on.
Has it ever worked? ICE is killing Americans, and you can't point your gun to them, its not lawful.
If Trump tells ICE to seize all weapons in the US, or otherwise shoot people, you can't point your gun to them, its not lawful.
> tells ICE to seize all weapons in the US
Outside the constitution, outside their jurisdiction, and not lawful.
Popular sovereignty always works. One way or another.
The most wrong opinion in the debate is to claim that we will be punished for open carry demonstrations. Only an abuse victim excuses the attacker, and allowing the attacker to do what they want is just catch 22.
ICE killing Americans is also not lawful. Without law, you have anarchy. In anarchy, everything is allowed. Good luck.
As a prolific, up-to-date not sticking my head in the sand vibe coder, I was apalled by the amount of disregard and denial of the way that Artificial Super Intelligence is redefining software. Maybe if we face reality as an open source community we can eventually come to tackle evil geniuses the likes of Sam Altman and such. The current approach is NOT working!
Already a recap?
Why not? Most people reflect on their day before they go to bed.
This was a really long one. Sometimes there is a race to be the first posting recaps
exactly this
My only disappointment with this year's geopolitcs-enhanced (always a welcome addition to tech by the way, as tech is ultimately steered by politics!) FOSDEM is a great underrepresentation of mainland China, and more generally the whole Global South. It is sad to see this omission in a time when the EU's free movement needs more like minded allies than ever. And what can be more free than that untethered by the chains of empire.
Sure, there was some mention of Brazil in some talks. And yes, a couple of China specific speakers etc, but in my view this is almost cancelled by the inclusion of topics about taiwan. Similarly the China focused talks mention "specific risks" stemming ostensibly from a differing system of governance.
Almost as if corporate sponsorships induce self censorships which limit true organizing effort.
FOSDEM is the Free Open Source Developers European Meetup. It's expected that people from China don't like traveling a long way to Europe. They have other FOS conferences in China.
Corporate sponsorships enabling "self-censorship"? That's rich from someone whitewashing authoritarianism. If FOSDEM underrepresented China, good - tech thrives without Beijing's chains. Bring real open-source contributions next time, not propaganda.
I receive stickers from Taiwan booth. From China I receive nothing
I for one found this event really sad. It's like the OSS community has rejected the past 5 years of software and technological changes and now choses to live in a retro computing bubble.
We're in 2026, hardware is made in dark factories in shenzhen in fully automated assembly lines by the million of units. Software is written using LLMs hosted in gigantic datacenters. Millions of people are now writing their own software with vibe coding platforms from their phones
What is the FOSDEM community's answer to the real concerns that these changes pose ? Let's hand solder raspberry pis ! let's self host LLMS from 2 years ago on FreeBSD ! Look, i can run wasn linux on this risc-v cpu !
These takes are completely out of touch with reality, no wonder that nobody younger than 40 was attending the conference. The next generation is doing something else and rightly so.
> What is the FOSDEM community's answer to the real concerns that these changes pose ? Let's hand solder raspberry pis ! let's self host LLMS from 2 years ago on FreeBSD ! Look, i can run wasn linux on this risc-v cpu !
Maybe, just maybe, they're having fun? FOSS is not only about corporate open-source, but also genuine curiosity. Both can have their place.
> no wonder that nobody younger than 40 was attending the conference. The next generation is doing something else and rightly so.
I saw a lot of students at FOSDEM, attending, presenting and helping the at organization.
OSS original point wasn't just to have fun among nerds, but to have a real impact on the world. Fun and curiosity is fine, but there's a line where it becomes a tech themed larp event, and FOSDEM is trending towards the later.
Corporate Open Source should have its place at FOSDEM. The linux dinosaur companies such as Redhat are still there. But what about the new ones ? What about Mistral, Odoo ? Even the 'evil' ones such as facebook, github, etc, aren't they contributing a lot of open software ? Aren't they more relevant than let's say Olimex ?
There were some students, yes but the attendence is growing old, and the chit chat is more about 'remember this and that' than 'we're building the future'
Looking at the talk lineup of a LLM related devroom, it sounds forward looking to me: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/track/ai/
> but to have a real impact on the world.
I did find devrooms, stands, and main track talks on this.
> Even the 'evil' ones such as facebook, github, etc, aren't they contributing a lot of open software
Google is one of the two lead financial sponsors of FOSDEM (the other being RedHat). So clearly, there doesn't seem to be any restriction or judgement by the organizers on whether BigTech is 'evil'. I get that Jack Dorsey (of Square/Block) withdrew his main track talk the year prior, which was unfortunate.
> the chit chat is more about 'remember this and that' than 'we're building the future'
Well, for better or for worse, FOSDEM is not exclusively a tech start-up event.
Iirc. Jack was accepted by the organizers but pressured out by the community.
Also, about github: Had a chat with the Gitlab chap doing the Git talk in the main track. Apparently they dialed back their involvement with upstream git quite a bit. Github is currently providing a lot of infra gratis (thanks!) but is at best neutral to code and community.
> Looking at the talk lineup of a LLM related devroom, it sound forward looking to me: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/track/ai/
It doesn't to me at all, it is mainly focused on self hosting llms, which is a complete deadend. It just isn't feasible to self host the useful models, the hardware requirements are just too big.
The current topic of focus around AI are: how to adapt development practice to agentic coding, agent harness, agent orchestration, mcp integrations, etc.
I guess there is some unease in the oss community to rely on large companies to run and host the models. But this isn't entirely new, we also relied on big companies to manufacture our computers. It's just the way it is.
> Well, for better or for worse, FOSDEM is not a tech start-up event.
It is weird, there are a lot of startups present, look at all the stands showcasing projects. Aren't those startups ? What I noticed is that they are usually funded by public grants rather than VCs. I am not sure why this is the case.
I met several people self–hosting LLMs including a man from Tenstorrent demonstrating their accelerator card.
> What I noticed is that they are usually funded by public grants rather than VCs. I am not sure why this is the case.
American VC culture derives from America's privileged position in the global financial system. It can't be replicated by a country that doesn't have a ton of money floating around looking for investments.
Second reason: nobody likes what American VC culture created, so they don't want it to be replicated. Government grant funding can make decisions on axes other than profitability.
Public grants are nice but they have couple of shortcomings and which is why they can get you only that far. They are normally low in capital, the execution is really slow (couple of months to one year), and larger grants too involve politics. The process is too formal (inflexible and too time-consuming) and also quite discriminating to individuals/small-groups who do have the big ideas but are not running the business already (I mean how can they). Proposal evaluation also has its own shortcomings - there's very little incentive for the actual experts to join the evaluation process (it's paid pennies) and generally speaking this leads to another chicken&egg problem - you're presenting something novel to the pool of people who might not have the capacity to understand the idea - neither the vision nor execution.
That said, I am not attracted to the VC culture but their process delivers the value which creates successful companies.
NLNET is always coming up at FOSDEM. Since they have a decent track record of issuing grants, the EU delegates them some money to use in their own less bureaucratic granting process. They call this "cascade funding". NLNET has funded a lot of random individual projects you can find on their website. Nominally, your proposal must have something to do with their goals.
This year there is more emphasis on bringing complete solutions to market. Previously they were funding much more experimentation.
> This year there is more emphasis on bringing complete solutions to market. Previously they were funding much more experimentation.
That's the step in the right direction however there's what I believe is a major issue with the NLNET scheme - there is no fastrack possibility for really great ideas with very potent market impact - you have to spend (lose) ~year to prove your idea is worthy by applying to Zero Commons or similar grant instead of just getting the 200-500k to really get the project hitting the ground.
One year is exceptionally long period in tech, and if the idea is right, you need to have all the resources to execute it - working solely on the project for the whole year for 50,000 EUR is simply not the strategy that can work out in a highly competitive (world) space.
How should they know your project is worth investing 500k? I heard they've got 3x8M, per year I presume, so 500k is a huge chunk of that. Everyone thinks their project is worth 500k, what makes yours different from the rest?
Yes, many might believe that their project is worth more than it really is but in my proposition authors of the idea are not the ones who get to decide that but people from NLNET or whatever grant. What I am saying is that currently there is no such process at all and this is a foundational problem with the way how these grants are working.
Another question is what you need 500k for, for an unproven project?
Did you not understand any of the words I wrote?
I guess not. Can you specify it in more concrete terms? They're not just buying your project for an arbitrary price, or VC-investing, they're paying your living costs and hosting costs while you create a donation to the public good, that's how grants work.
They give you 500k if you have a really good reason why you need that... and why the result is worth it... and why your project is more worth it than all the other several projects, combined, they could spend the same 500k on. Most of them are one or two people's living cost for 6 months to a year or so.
I genuinely hope you're a bot. If you're not then please consider being respectful in your conversations and address the question being asked rather than moving goalposts - it is extremely annoying. If you're out of your arguments, learn to say "I don't know".
And I also do hope, if you're a human, that you're not sitting anywhere close to decision making committee be it in NLNET or any other grant program because if you do, it fits into the (terrible) narrative of software market in the EU.
I think the one out of touch is you. Do you really think that depending on proprietary third party services is in the spirit of open source software? You didn't just say people should depend on proprietary models, whose output could at least be considered open source, you're talking about "vibe coding platforms" like lovable, which contain an unavoidable proprietary infrastructure component.
You're also engaging in historical revisionism. "5 years ago" means you're expecting everyone to have jumped on Github Copilot on day one or else they're behind. LLM assisted software development only really took off in the last three years and even then you were still a trailblazer.
I believe anti–bigtech talks are quietly rejected due to the corporate sponsorship. OFFDEM is an anti–bigtech fork of FOSDEM.
"nobody younger than 40 was attending"
Hmmm, I was there and this is definitely not true.
It’s not clear what you want them to do instead.
Have an AI track focused on how to use AI to improve OSS software instead of how to run LLama on RISC-V.
Invite the open source developpers behind popular OSS AI frameworks such as opencode, etc.
Invite talkers from large companies that produce open source software and models such as Mistral.AI
Invite talkers from companies that run OSS LLMs at scale such as groq
Invite the people who build drones in Ukraine, (probably the most succesful open hardware story to date). Have drone building workshops / drone piloting stands
It's been ~three years now we've been hearing about "AI" non-stop. Am a bit tired of it to be honest.
But the AI talked about 3 years ago are not the same kind of projects that are being talked about today. It's rapidly evolving. There is a lot of new scope available for new open source projects to take. This isn't open source reimplementing the same thing for 3 years straight.
It is extremely exhausting, but it's also the biggest change in tech since the invention of the internet. It don't think it can be ignored.
That's certainly what the companies who stand to profit want us to believe. But I don't think it is. I think it's yet another hype storm without any actual utility to back it up.
It's definitely not a hype.
"open source software and models such as Mistral.AI"
No training data -> not "open source"
No code for the training -> not "open source"
> Have an AI track focused on how to use AI to improve OSS software
Like this AI track? What more do you want?
https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/track/ai/
Sounds good! You should propose to give that talk next year.
Anyone can propose a devroom for FOSDEM, I hope you'll do it next year :)
Yes, maybe I should.
Remember this is just one conference. This is not a top–down imposition of a new European world order. While the amount of policy discussion is quite high — out of necessity now — and EU representatives attend — this event is still a lot of developers coming together.
This is also why the EU has a hard time. America prefers the capitalist model. EU is trying to find ways encourage individual developers each with their own interests to contribute to shared European goals (which the devs also share but might not find interesting), and they're trying to do this without directly saying "you there, go and do this", and that's harder than herding cats.
For instance they do it through NLNET funding. Devs can propose projects and the ones the EU wants to fund will receive funding. It's a roundabout way to do things. Let's see if it pays off.
> What is the FOSDEM community's answer to the real concerns that these changes pose ?
I only caught half a dozen talks, and two of them talked about this exact point.
which ones ? would like to watch them. thanks in advance
- Open source security in spite of AI.
- Formal verification in Rocq, an exhaustive testing.
LLM turds will degrade more and more over time. The newbies will become even dumber and people with actual knowledge will be several steps over anthing else trained to copy and paste from bullshitters.
Yeah man.
Just like how novel reading, newspapers, music, rock music, the internet, computer games all made everyone super dumb and the world ended.
I am definitely sure that this time you are right and the world will actually end this time, everyones going to end up way dumber than you, or if they dont, you will still pretend it happened and be smug about it on the internet.
they kind of did
Mobile computer games compared to the ones from the 80's, 90's, and early 00's? For sure. Ditto with tons of best sellers, which are very dull and dumbed down compared to what I could read in Spanish "Dollar Stores" like shops in Spain such as the books Clarke/PKD and Orwell novels for very little, less than what $2 were in Pesetas (pre Euro Spanish currency) in late 90's.
Nowadays you have AI generated books which are very surpar even if they look an impressive exercise of LLM's.
Would you mind showing some compassion for the unintelligent, it's none of their fault.. It's incentives, sociodynamics and manifold other preconditions that bring about these symptoms.
One of these is AI proliferation. GP is not merely virtue signalling — GP is directly contributing to raising average intelligence by discouraging reliance on AI.
> let's self host LLMS from 2 years ago on FreeBSD
Sounds brilliant. 2024 LLMs were great, and hosted in gigantic datacenters. South Park did an episode on ChatGPT in 2023 to assist with the timescales.
If we can run Free LLMs on a desktop PC that's competitive with 2024 a massive win.
Unless of course you believe that AI will continue to increase exponentially, in which case we're heading for such a different world in 10-15 years that it's meaningless to worry about it and you might as well have fun before the AI decides to kill us all