FOSDEM stands for Free and Open-source Software Developers' European Meeting.
Going to FOSDEM is like travelling back in time through the ages of the digital world.
An event that started in 2000 and has been running continuously bringing together some of the greatest minds and enthusiastic people on the planet around freedom, free and open source software.
What makes the event special among other things is that it is completely free and volunteer run but also its un-conference nature and incredible fringe events prior to the FOSDEM weekend.
Some of these incredible fringe events include Code & Compliance 2026, FOSS license and security compliance tools workshop, AI Plumbers (un)conference, Digital Public Goods FOSDEM26 Side Event and OpenEmbedded Workshop just to name a few....
What makes this entire set of events possible is the sale of T-shirts, hoodies etc and some incredible organizations and companies like Redhat, Google, Eclipse Foundation, Grafana Labs, Codethink, Mozilla and many more...
I went to FOSDEM to gather as much information for the Joomla! Project and its community about the CRA (the CyberResiliency Act) which was voted into law in December 2024 and will start coming into effect later this year and next.
Walking the hall of l'Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) / Free University of Brussels, you get a sense that at around every corner you will meet some historically significant man or woman whose project you either use every day without knowing, have contributed to or simply use...
I found myself in a workshop with the creator of CURL (who started his FOSS project in 1996 with 100 lines of code - today, it's 180,000 lines of code) one day, and the next eating a Belgium waffle between session in the court yard between Buildings U and F and meeting the humblest of person only responsible for HTTP itself 😳.
Entering buildings to find your way to different sessions, you detour through a maze of little stands with each FOSS project more interesting than the next from Bio-hacking to Firefly Zero or demonstrations of the OpenFlexure Microscope... as well as your super popular projects that most people know: Mozilla, Let's Encrypt, Canonical (Ubuntu), Nextcloud to name a few...
That was a palpable giddiness from un-conference attendees whether in sessions or walking around randomly meeting and talking about their or some other project that they have been part of for years... There was also perhaps surprisingly a