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FOSDEM 2026 – Open-Source Conference in Brussels – Day#1 Recap

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Re: FOSDEM 2026 – Open-Source Conference in Brussels – Day#1 Recap

#161

Post by iso1631 »

dijit wrote: post #58
GreenDolphinSys wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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. No…

So if someone wants to close your local library you wouldn't have a problem? If someone decides that you can't have a £5 computer, you have to subscribe to a computer service?

Read this and tell me free software is not politics

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

Re: FOSDEM 2026 – Open-Source Conference in Brussels – Day#1 Recap

#162

Post by menaerus »

direwolf20 wrote: post #146
fvdessen wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Looking at the talk lineup of a LLM related devroom, it sound forward looking to me: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/track/ai/ It doesn't to me at all, it is mainly focused on self hosting llms, which is a complete deadend. It just isn't feasible to self host the useful models, the hardware requirements are just too big. The current topic of focus around AI are: how to adapt development practice to agentic coding,…

I met several people self–hosting LLMs including a man from Tenstorrent demonstrating their accelerator card. > What I noticed is that they are usually funded by public grants rather than VCs. I am not sure why this is the case. American VC culture derives from America's privileged position in the global financial system. It can't be replicated by a country that doesn't have a ton of money floating around looking for…

Public grants are nice but they have couple of shortcomings and which is why they can get you only that far. They are normally low in capital, the execution is really slow (couple of months to one year), and larger grants too involve politics. The process is too formal (inflexible and too time-consuming) and also quite discriminating to individuals/small-groups who do have the big ideas but are not running the business already (I mean how can they). Proposal evaluation also has its own shortcomings - there's very little incentive for the actual experts to join the evaluation process (it's paid pennies) and generally speaking this leads to another chicken&egg problem - you're presenting something novel to the pool of people who might not have the capacity to understand the idea - neither the vision nor execution.

That said, I am not attracted to the VC culture but their process delivers the value which creates successful companies.

Re: FOSDEM 2026 – Open-Source Conference in Brussels – Day#1 Recap

#163

Post by iso1631 »

wiz21c wrote: post #17
haunter wrote: post #13

> 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 y…

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…

The 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.

Re: FOSDEM 2026 – Open-Source Conference in Brussels – Day#1 Recap

#164

Post by direwolf20 »

menaerus wrote: post #162
direwolf20 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I met several people self–hosting LLMs including a man from Tenstorrent demonstrating their accelerator card. > What I noticed is that they are usually funded by public grants rather than VCs. I am not sure why this is the case. American VC culture derives from America's privileged position in the global financial system. It can't be replicated by a country that doesn't have a ton of money floating around looking for…

Public grants are nice but they have couple of shortcomings and which is why they can get you only that far. They are normally low in capital, the execution is really slow (couple of months to one year), and larger grants too involve politics. The process is too formal (inflexible and too time-consuming) and also quite discriminating to individuals/small-groups who do have the big ideas but are not running the busine…

NLNET is always coming up at FOSDEM. Since they have a decent track record of issuing grants, the EU delegates them some money to use in their own less bureaucratic granting process. They call this "cascade funding". NLNET has funded a lot of random individual projects you can find on their website. Nominally, your proposal must have something to do with their goals.

This year there is more emphasis on bringing complete solutions to market. Previously they were funding much more experimentation.

Re: FOSDEM 2026 – Open-Source Conference in Brussels – Day#1 Recap

#165

Post by menaerus »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #119
fvdessen wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is extremely exhausting, but it's also the biggest change in tech since the invention of the internet. It don't think it can be ignored.

That's certainly what the companies who stand to profit want us to believe. But I don't think it is. I think it's yet another hype storm without any actual utility to back it up.

It's definitely not a hype.

Re: FOSDEM 2026 – Open-Source Conference in Brussels – Day#1 Recap

#166

Post by iso1631 »

fvdessen wrote: post #48

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 soft…

> let's self host LLMS from 2 years ago on FreeBSD

Sounds brilliant. 2024 LLMs were great, and hosted in gigantic datacenters. South Park did an episode on ChatGPT in 2023 to assist with the timescales.

If we can run Free LLMs on a desktop PC that's competitive with 2024 a massive win.

Unless of course you believe that AI will continue to increase exponentially, in which case we're heading for such a different world in 10-15 years that it's meaningless to worry about it and you might as well have fun before the AI decides to kill us all

Re: FOSDEM 2026 – Open-Source Conference in Brussels – Day#1 Recap

#167

Post by zoobab »

"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...

Re: FOSDEM 2026 – Open-Source Conference in Brussels – Day#1 Recap

#168

Post by zoobab »

dwedge wrote: post #45
rurban wrote: post #3

With the car? I go by train, and then either by bike or tram. Much easier

Almost everyone I spoke to this year had issues with the trains into Belgium. Cancellations, delays, strikes.

Strikes are normal when politicians wants to steal pensions.

Re: FOSDEM 2026 – Open-Source Conference in Brussels – Day#1 Recap

#169

Post by zoobab »

fvdessen wrote: post #77
mixmastamyk wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not clear what you want them to do instead.

Have an AI track focused on how to use AI to improve OSS software instead of how to run LLama on RISC-V. Invite the open source developpers behind popular OSS AI frameworks such as opencode, etc. Invite talkers from large companies that produce open source software and models such as Mistral.AI Invite talkers from companies that run OSS LLMs at scale such as groq Invite the people who build drones in Ukraine, (probab…

"open source software and models such as Mistral.AI"

No training data -> not "open source"

No code for the training -> not "open source"

Re: FOSDEM 2026 – Open-Source Conference in Brussels – Day#1 Recap

#170

Post by menaerus »

direwolf20 wrote: post #164
menaerus wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public grants are nice but they have couple of shortcomings and which is why they can get you only that far. They are normally low in capital, the execution is really slow (couple of months to one year), and larger grants too involve politics. The process is too formal (inflexible and too time-consuming) and also quite discriminating to individuals/small-groups who do have the big ideas but are not running the busine…

NLNET is always coming up at FOSDEM. Since they have a decent track record of issuing grants, the EU delegates them some money to use in their own less bureaucratic granting process. They call this "cascade funding". NLNET has funded a lot of random individual projects you can find on their website. Nominally, your proposal must have something to do with their goals. This year there is more emphasis on bringing compl…

> This year there is more emphasis on bringing complete solutions to market. Previously they were funding much more experimentation.

That's the step in the right direction however there's what I believe is a major issue with the NLNET scheme - there is no fastrack possibility for really great ideas with very potent market impact - you have to spend (lose) ~year to prove your idea is worthy by applying to Zero Commons or similar grant instead of just getting the 200-500k to really get the project hitting the ground.

One year is exceptionally long period in tech, and if the idea is right, you need to have all the resources to execute it - working solely on the project for the whole year for 50,000 EUR is simply not the strategy that can work out in a highly competitive (world) space.

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