Good morning, Brussels! First day of #FOSDEM 2026. Lots of people and lots of talks.
Discussion
Loading...
And if you wake up early, you'll find seats!
Keynote starts: "FOSDEM is the center of open source" "The center of Belgium" "The center of the European Union" "The center of the free world"
First slide with "sovereignty" on it. "If we lose democracy, open source will be irrelevant"
"Open source was always about politics"
The numbers: 1014 events, 1186 speakers, 66 track/devrooms
"Don't skip the food queue but let staff and volunteers do it."
And if the room is full, or if you are remote: https://fosdem.org/schedule/streaming/
"FOSS in times of war, scarcity and (adversarial) AI", talk by Michiel Leenaars "We need to talk about war"'
Because not everything at #FOSDEM can be fun.
[FOSS = Free / Open Source Software. AI = generating funny answers to stupid questions]
~18 more replies (not shown)
The growth of the Internet and of free software was during a time of [relative] peace and hope, after the end of the cold war [in Europe]. It was ideal and we forgot about war, dictatorship and other nasty things.
Then, we moved to hyperscalers/ GAFAM
"Cloud first strategy" means you're proud of your incompetence.