And if you wake up early, you'll find seats!

#FOSDEM

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"

#FOSDEM

First slide with "sovereignty" on it. "If we lose democracy, open source will be irrelevant"

"Open source was always about politics"

#FOSDEM

@opheliecoelho

The numbers: 1014 events, 1186 speakers, 66 track/devrooms

"Don't skip the food queue but let staff and volunteers do it."

#FOSDEM

And if the room is full, or if you are remote: fosdem.org/schedule/streaming/

#FOSDEM

FOSDEM 2026 - Live Streaming

^fosdem.org

"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]

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.

#FOSDEM

Then, we moved to hyperscalers/ GAFAM

"Cloud first strategy" means you're proud of your incompetence.

#FOSDEM

And with deliberate attacks (think supply-chain), free software is in the battleground.

And we are not ready for that.

#FOSDEM

Hey, but there are a lot of free seats in the Social Web devroom at #FOSDEM. Come and join us!

Starting "Tending the Herd: Community at Mastodon"

Purely corporate speak from Mastodon official, boring and self-serving. (And insisting that new users should be directed to one specific instance, but no longer mastodon.social, but mandatory Mastodon and have to agree with the terms of use.)

#FOSDEM

Now, Benjamin Bellamy (not the artist, the other one), "Amplify Our Voices: Building Digital Sovereignty on the Fediverse"

#FOSDEM