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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

#171

Post by teekert »

direwolf20 wrote: post #136
teekert wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What is your definition of politics?

It's about governance of society, about how decisions concerning society are being made. About what processes we adhere to. About agreeing to follow those process together, instead of resorting to primitive things like violence.

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

#172

Post by teekert »

direwolf20 wrote: post #150
teekert wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It used to work quite well. Perhaps together you can think of a cause to the rift, and try to actively fight it instead of each other. Start with commonalities, not differences. I think it’s important to, at the very least, never stop trying.

How extreme of moral axiom differences should we tolerate?

Let me answer you with 2 other questions:

Is this line of thinking going to make things better for future generations or is it not?

How important is it to work on defining this boundary, compared to working towards a less polarized society?

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

#173

Post by jraph »

zoobab wrote: post #167

"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...

I suspect it would be true of most conferences or events like this. The presentations are mostly excuses to justify the event and perhaps to help gather and identify the people sharing the same topics.

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

#174

Post by direwolf20 »

menaerus wrote: post #170
direwolf20 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How should they know your project is worth investing 500k? I heard they've got 3x8M, per year I presume, so 500k is a huge chunk of that. Everyone thinks their project is worth 500k, what makes yours different from the rest?

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

#175

Post by teekert »

rendx wrote: post #74
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 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 as such "fact" and not an opinion; nothing to be "political" about), and everyone else is just plain wrong/mistaken. Since they're not ready to admit this to themselves and others, they hide behind the "apolitical" label. Otherwise they would see tha…

One can recognize the importance of defining processes for how decisions pertaining to a soceity are being made, and adhering to those, while, at the same time, trying not to judge views other than yours, or simply trying not to engage too much in debates pertaining to that process. In other words, you can choose not to let politics seep to much into your identify.

I am a hacker, a baker of breads, a father, a debater, a thinker. Period. Not libertarian or whatever. My ideas sometimes are more like a democrat, sometimes more republican. I often like Bernie Sanders, and Schwarzenegger would be a nice, good, kind republican president imho. I don't like being seen as a part of any of these groups. I enjoy discussing reasons for "the 2 party" (but not really 2 party-) system much more than discussing which is morally superior.

This, to me, is a valid stance. For some it is the way to stay sane.

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

#176

Post by direwolf20 »

teekert wrote: post #171
direwolf20 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your definition of politics?

It's about governance of society, about how decisions concerning society are being made. About what processes we adhere to. About agreeing to follow those process together, instead of resorting to primitive things like violence.

then FOSS is political. It's about processes we adhere to and how decisions are made. Microsoft makes a decision to ban the ICC from Windows and has a process for this. Linux has a different process where they can't make that decision because it's impossible.

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

#177

Post by direwolf20 »

teekert wrote: post #172
direwolf20 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How extreme of moral axiom differences should we tolerate?

Let me answer you with 2 other questions: Is this line of thinking going to make things better for future generations or is it not? How important is it to work on defining this boundary, compared to working towards a less polarized society?

How can society become less polarised if we normalise an extremely wide spectrum of different moral axioms? To reduce polarisation, people with extremist moral axioms must stop having them, which can't happen if extremist moral axioms are accepted.

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

#178

Post by menaerus »

direwolf20 wrote: post #174
menaerus wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

How should they know your project is worth investing 500k? I heard they've got 3x8M, per year I presume, so 500k is a huge chunk of that. Everyone thinks their project is worth 500k, what makes yours different from the rest?

Yes, many might believe that their project is worth more than it really is but in my proposition authors of the idea are not the ones who get to decide that but people from NLNET or whatever grant. What I am saying is that currently there is no such process at all and this is a foundational problem with the way how these grants are working.

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

#179

Post by ptx »

NekkoDroid wrote: post #157
ongy wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's mainly re-hashed. I think I've seen the same talk twice before? At least once. It's a very "I've made a cool thing. This is what I think is cool about it" type of talk. Which I don't think is uncommon for FOSDEM. Maybe a bit uncommon for a higher profile figure like Lennart.

> It's mainly re-hashed. I think I've seen the same talk twice before? At least once. He held a similar talk at All Systems Go I think (I missed the talk here at FOSDEM). > It's a very "I've made a cool thing. This is what I think is cool about it" type of talk. Varlink isn't something he just made up, he mearly "adopted it" (started making use of it). It existed before, but I don't know anything that really made use…

Who made it up, then?

The official-looking website at https://varlink.org doesn't give any information about who the authors are, as far as I can tell, but the screenshots show the username "kay". There's a git repo for libvarlink [1] where the first commits (from 2017) are by Kay Sievers, who is one of the systemd developers.

An announcement post [2] from later in 2017, by Harald Hoyer, says that the varlink protocol was created by Kay Sievers and Lars Karlitski in "our team", presumably referring to the systemd team.

So the systemd developers "adopted" their own thing from themselves?

[1] https://github.com/varlink/libvarlink

[2] https://harald.hoyer.xyz/2017/12/18/varlink/

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

#180

Post by Sesse__ »

direwolf20 wrote: post #117
NeutralForest wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah ofc but I also like to walk around, I might just camp in a room next year.

This year they said they avoided making single–project rooms. These are the ones people camped in the most, I think.

Is that right? There were devrooms for GCC, Go, LLVM, Nix, Plan 9, Python and many more.
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