> 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.
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
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.
> 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 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 everyone else is just plain wrong. 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 make a difference if you voice it or not, or just live by it.
It works poorly to avoid conflict, since one just shifts conflict elsewhere. Hence the need to self-isolate to avoid getting in contact with... positions such as one's own.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
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 ;))
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Where I'm going is in the complete opposite direction, making paths for consumer demand to get into the software and form a real two-way relationship between the programming & support and users who just want to put money in and get stuff out.
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
> 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 :)
I watched at home and drank Belgian beer in the afternoon.
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.
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.
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.
Was the Eurostar delayed, does anyone know?
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.
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.
> 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 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 everyone else is just plain wrong. 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 make a difference if you voice it or not, or just live by it.
It works poorly to avoid conflict, since one just shifts conflict elsewhere. Hence the need to self-isolate to avoid getting in contact with... positions such as one's own.
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.
Your reading of "politics" seems quite narrow. Creating a place free of social status, hierarchies and with equal opportunity? That's 100% politics.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
Sure sounds that way.
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 ;))
An alternative: FluConf https://2026.fluconf.online/
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.
It's about collecting stickers.
It‘s about getting a selfie with the blue PostgreSQL elephant wandering around campus. :-)
It's about the friends you make when collecting stickers.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 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.
Fosdem just has a huge amount of talks. Some are great, most aren't.
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
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.
"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.
> 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.
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.
Totally. People who feel this way, please get in touch with me. https://positron.solutions
Where I'm going is in the complete opposite direction, making paths for consumer demand to get into the software and form a real two-way relationship between the programming & support and users who just want to put money in and get stuff out.