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FOSDEM 2026 – Open-Source Conference in Brussels – Day#1 Recap
- yannick2k 8mo agogyptazy 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.
- torvald 8mo agoHello 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.
- ongy 8mo agoThe 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.
- patrickmcnamara 8mo agoIt's about collecting stickers.
- em3rgent0rdr 8mo agoIt's about the friends you make when collecting stickers.
- cozzyd 8mo agoSounds a lot like McMurdo
- Tomte 8mo agoIt‘s about getting a selfie with the blue PostgreSQL elephant wandering around campus. :-)
- direwolf20 8mo agoIt's about meeting people who go to FOSDEM.
- pjmlp 8mo agoIt 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.
- aapoalas 8mo agoI was sitting behind you as you wrote this comment. I just wanted to tell you that.
- ghaff 8mo agoScale 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.
- zoobab 8mo ago"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...
- hyperman1 8mo agoThe 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.
- rurban 8mo agoWith the car? I go by train, and then either by bike or tram. Much easier
- thunfischbrot 8mo ago> 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.)
- 0ct4via 8mo agoThe 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.
- ongy 8mo agoWhich 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? €€€
- lucb1e 8mo agoAnd reliable. This is why I (near the border) drive across the border and take the train through Belgium. https://belgiantrain.be 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
- madduci 8mo agoAlready a recap?
- haunter 8mo ago> 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.
- wiz21c 8mo agowith 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.
- positron26 8mo ago[flagged]
- voldemolt 8mo ago[dead]
- iso1631 8mo agoThe 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.
- Teever 8mo agoYour 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?
- pulkitsh1234 8mo ago> 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.
- ahartmetz 8mo agoFosdem just has a huge amount of talks. Some are great, most aren't.
- direwolf20 8mo agoyou don't go there for the talks. You go to meet other people who go.
- kragniz 8mo agoPlease leave feedback on talks (good and bad), it is useful for helping shape the program for next year
- direwolf20 8mo agospecifically to feedback@fosdem.org At the closing, they requested that you send them any feedback about any part of the event
- kragniz 8mo agoAlso on each talks page on the website you can find a "Submit Feedback" link for feedback on that specific talk
- zoobab 8mo ago"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.
- larodi 8mo agoThe contrast of this text is really awful, how does anyone even read it without reader mode?
- yladiz 8mo agoIt 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.
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 8mo agoIsn't it black on white? I can't see a color specified anywhere other than for <a>
- joezydeco 8mo agoFor 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.
- NeutralForest 8mo agoIt 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.
- AlexeyBrin 8mo agoNot the same experience of course, but I think you can watch the presentations you've missed https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/streaming/ https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/streaming/
- NeutralForest 8mo agoIndeed! 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.
- jzwinck 8mo agoFor 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.
- NeutralForest 8mo agoYeah ofc but I also like to walk around, I might just camp in a room next year.
- direwolf20 8mo agoThis year they said they avoided making single–project rooms. These are the ones people camped in the most, I think.
- Sesse__ 8mo agoIs that right? There were devrooms for GCC, Go, LLVM, Nix, Plan 9, Python and many more.
- notpublic 8mo agoOffline videos are available here: https://video.fosdem.org/2026 https://video.fosdem.org/2026 It's organized by room which you can find here: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/tracks/ https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/tracks/
- prima-facie 8mo agoHi, 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/ https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/speaker/lennart_poettering/ Thanks
- ahartmetz 8mo agoLook 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.
- thinkbud 8mo agoI 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!
- ahartmetz 8mo agoThe 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.
- ptx 8mo ago> 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 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=213186
- napolux 8mo agoThey do this every year since a while :)
- positron26 8mo agoAs 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.
- yunnpp 8mo agoI 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.
- positron26 8mo ago> 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.
- fvdessen 8mo agoI 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.
- positron26 8mo ago[flagged]
- guerby 8mo ago"nobody younger than 40 was attending" Hmmm, I was there and this is definitely not true.
- throw567643u8 8mo ago> 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.
- lmf4lol 8mo agowhich ones ? would like to watch them. thanks in advance
- throw567643u8 8mo ago- Open source security in spite of AI. - Formal verification in Rocq, an exhaustive testing.
- 8mo ago
- JohnDohnBohn 8mo agoIn the end, it’s all about socializing.
- throw567643u8 8mo agoI watched at home and drank Belgian beer in the afternoon.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- nesarkvechnep 8mo agoI hope you didn't get a hangover. They have great tasting beers but put too much sugar in them.
- throw567643u8 8mo agoIs the sugar fermented away? Definitely heavier than English beers.
- Insanity 8mo agoThat’s a sweeping generalization for hundreds of varieties of Belgian beers lol.
- brnt 8mo agoThey pump too much CO2 in it you mean. I prefer Polish and Ukrainian beers for this reason.
- ChrisArchitect 8mo agoAn alternative: FluConf https://2026.fluconf.online/ https://2026.fluconf.online/
- greatgib 8mo agoWhat 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.
- greatgib 8mo agoAs 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.
- ongy 8mo agoAgreed, 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.
- thinkbud 8mo agoMy 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.
- thinkpal 8mo agoI receive stickers from Taiwan booth. From China I receive nothing
- noDramaJustCode 8mo agoCorporate 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.
- direwolf20 8mo agoFOSDEM 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.
- thinkpal 8mo agoAs 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!
- zoobab 8mo ago"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...
- jraph 8mo agoI 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.
- direwolf20 8mo agoFOSDEM 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.
- zoobab 8mo agoBTW there were rooms in the past (2005 if I remember) where people could sit with their laptops and hack around.
- direwolf20 8mo agoThere were at CCC in 2005, too, now it's all allocated to assembly groups.
- pantalaimon 8mo agoRegistering 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.
- zoobab 8mo ago"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.
- corroclaro 8mo agoGlad 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.
- sillyfluke 8mo agoOn the positive side, I think the little bit of chaos that came from the natural disorganization of a "free conference" helped me get in to a few rooms despite the general overcrowding, it also made me miss a few talks cause I could never get a grip on the wacky room locations and numberings. I have this unsubstantiated fear though that having the conference more orderly may actually make things worse. I liked how some people brought their kids, that was great. (I found the anti-cash vibe in Brussels outside the conference pretty fucking annoying though. Metro machines that take coins but have no cash slot? What is this bullshit?)