Matthias J Mair

After having been interested in attending FOSDEM for years due to the event recordings and being implored by friends in the open hardware space that this would be my thing I went to FOSDEM 2026. It was worth it!

I shared a few thoughts after the first day on Mastodon, and it summarized my experience quite well:

Post by @matmair@mastodon.social

View on Mastodon

Ambience

The atmosphere in the halls and rooms is electrifying; people yearn to learn. There is a constant flow between the rooms - the programming is just too interesting everywhere to stay in one room.

The conference is spread across a few buildings on the ULB Solbosch campus, which is slightly hilly and an interesting mix of old brick buildings and modern(ish) facilities. Food can be bought in a festival-like area with food trucks or cafeterias.
There is ample seating on various levels to sit down and chat. I enjoyed just sitting and decompressing between information-packed talks while observing the interesting discussions around me.

Structure

Talks are held in auditoriums or lecture halls. They are clustered in devrooms which are focused on a specific topic (Open Hardware for example). Schedules are posted on the central website of the conference and are packed. Heralds coordinate the flow of talks / QAs and ensure that rooms get closed when full (which was often the case for talks I wanted to attend).

Most devrooms seemed to be a close-knit community of people that knew each other. In every room I attended, speakers interacted with members of the audience either to acknowledge their work on tooling, standards or community building.
It reminded me of university activities like Formula Student - which was also a lovely community when I participated for 2 far to short years.

Talk highlights

This is mainly a list for my own reference, but maybe it is interesting to others as well. Everything in the Open Hardware devroom was great.

Attended and would recommend:

• FOSS in times of war, scarcity and (adversarial) AI
• Open Source Security in spite of AI
• Get your docs in a row with Docling
• Why our HTML Docs don't just Print and what to do about it
• Automating Documentation: From DSL to Dynamic Docs with Asciidoctor and Antora
• OpenProject: A year Full of Updates
• MicroPythonOS: the best of Android, now on Microcontrollers. AppStore, OTA Updates, Touch Screen, Camera and much more!
• Funding Europe’s Open Digital Infrastructure: A Detailed Case for an EU Sovereign Tech Fund¹
• An Introduction to the OpenID Shared Signals Framework
• ECAD / MCAD collaboration with IDX
• KiConnect 1 Year In
• How Open Hardware Projects Create Ecosystems
• Collaboration, Iteration, Documentation, and Validation: An OpenFlexure Microscope Story
• KiCad Status
• FreeCAD - state of affairs
• PURL: From FOSDEM 2018 to international standard
• Binary Dependencies: Identifying the Hidden Packages We All Depend On
• Is it time for a Django Admin rewrite? If so, how?
• Building a sovereign digital workplace with the help of Python, an example of the french administration
• Design Systems in Open Source
• Procurement Is the Biggest Form of Fundraising for FLOSS

Did not attend but watched and recommend:

• LaSuite Docs : open source collaborative documentation platform
• Taiga, Tenzu and the small story of sustainability in opensource
• Modern security features for web apps
• The Cyber Resilience Act and web browsers
• Bonfire: Modular Communication Tools on the Open Social Web
• Deutsche Bahn's Approach to Large-Scale SBOM Collection and Use
• How public administrations are shifting their software supply chain paradigms – and why now
• A semantic framework for modelling and analysing supply chains through SBOMs
• It's Time to Audit Open Source: Success Stories with OSTIF

Closing thoughts

FOSDEM is very different from chaos events (which all have their own identity but seem to share a more political / activist undertone). It is more focused on knowledge sharing and learning, and that also resonates with me. There is still politics in talks and there are political tracks/devrooms - everything is political in the end - but it is not as much in your face.

Unrelated observation: Funding

I do not know where to put this so it is in the end here: it seems like funding the large, load-bearing projects slowly is getting solved. FreeCAD, KiCAD, OpenProject and many others seem to have found ways to get money through industry and grants.

NLNet and NGI Zero came up a lot (they are awesome). The EU has put a bit of money into these things but it is not enough and it has to become structural, especially in these uncertain times.