Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

gyptazy.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 251 posts

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

#201

Post by NekkoDroid »

ptx wrote: post #179
NekkoDroid wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 protoco…

While I guess you aren't wrong, I also wouldn't say you are entirely correct that Kay is a systemd developer. He use to work on udev, but hasn't been active in any meaningful way on it for 2 years before varlinks release[1]. For what it was made I can't really say, but Lennart hadn't start integrating Varlink until a while after its release (I think I remember it being like 2021 or so when he started making use of it, after another check it seems the start of varlink stuff in systemd was 2019[2]).

[1]: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commits/main/?author=kays...

[2]: https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Asystemd%2Fsystemd+varlink...

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

#202

Post by positron26 »

direwolf20 wrote: post #139
positron26 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think anyone is confused about American OSS and American corporations run amok... You literally just lumped it all together, exactly the fallacy I'm voicing my concern about. > foreign-owned proprietary OSS is global. "Foreign owned" is relative. If Americans reject "European" open source, it would make zero sense. > the US model What even is "the US model?" The things that are being described as "American"…

It's a European event.

You would have been able to see this by looking at a graph of my karma against the hour of day. There's truly an ideological dispersion across the Atlantic.

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

#203

Post by zoobab »

direwolf20 wrote: post #187
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...

FOSDEM is simply not CCC. They are different events run by different people with different visions. If you want CCC you can (with good luck or a group affiliation) go to CCC. Or EMF — Electromagnetic Field.

BTW there were rooms in the past (2005 if I remember) where people could sit with their laptops and hack around.

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

#204

Post by direwolf20 »

zoobab wrote: post #203
direwolf20 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FOSDEM is simply not CCC. They are different events run by different people with different visions. If you want CCC you can (with good luck or a group affiliation) go to CCC. Or EMF — Electromagnetic Field.

BTW there were rooms in the past (2005 if I remember) where people could sit with their laptops and hack around.

There were at CCC in 2005, too, now it's all allocated to assembly groups.

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

#205

Post by direwolf20 »

menaerus wrote: post #190
direwolf20 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another question is what you need 500k for, for an unproven project?

Did you not understand any of the words I wrote?

I guess not. Can you specify it in more concrete terms? They're not just buying your project for an arbitrary price, or VC-investing, they're paying your living costs and hosting costs while you create a donation to the public good, that's how grants work.

They give you 500k if you have a really good reason why you need that... and why the result is worth it... and why your project is more worth it than all the other several projects, combined, they could spend the same 500k on. Most of them are one or two people's living cost for 6 months to a year or so.

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

#206

Post by ptx »

NekkoDroid wrote: post #201
ptx wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 protoco…

While I guess you aren't wrong, I also wouldn't say you are entirely correct that Kay is a systemd developer. He use to work on udev, but hasn't been active in any meaningful way on it for 2 years before varlinks release[1]. For what it was made I can't really say, but Lennart hadn't start integrating Varlink until a while after its release (I think I remember it being like 2021 or so when he started making use of it…

Kay Sievers' Wikipedia page cites a blog post by Lennart Poettering [1] which says that systemd was designed in "close cooperation" with Kay Sievers and that Harald Hoyer was also involved, so it seems pretty clear that he's on the team that develops systemd, the team that Harald Hoyer referred to as "our team". All three of them gave a talk [2] together in 2013 about what they were developing.

If Lennart Poettering "adopted" varlink, he seems to have done so from members of his own team ("our team") who created varlink and who are also fellow co-creators of systemd.

[1] https://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html#faqs

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rrpjYD373A

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

#207

Post by menaerus »

direwolf20 wrote: post #205
menaerus wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you not understand any of the words I wrote?

I guess not. Can you specify it in more concrete terms? They're not just buying your project for an arbitrary price, or VC-investing, they're paying your living costs and hosting costs while you create a donation to the public good, that's how grants work. They give you 500k if you have a really good reason why you need that... and why the result is worth it... and why your project is more worth it than all the other…

I genuinely hope you're a bot. If you're not then please consider being respectful in your conversations and address the question being asked rather than moving goalposts - it is extremely annoying. If you're out of your arguments, learn to say "I don't know".

And I also do hope, if you're a human, that you're not sitting anywhere close to decision making committee be it in NLNET or any other grant program because if you do, it fits into the (terrible) narrative of software market in the EU.

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

#208

Post by zoobab »

pulkitsh1234 wrote: post #16

> The quality of the talks was high Maybe I was in the wrong rooms, but the quality of the talks were really low.. Most of them were advertising one kind of service or another.

"Most of them were advertising one kind of service or another."

10y ago we had the issue with one of the talks in the IOT devroom which was very "corporate" with one presentation turning into the promotion of a proprietary product.

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

#209

Post by zoobab »

yunnpp wrote: post #44
positron26 wrote: post #41

As a US citizen, when I see the phrase "European digital sovereignty," I'm a bit concerned that our OSS enthusiast and activist allies in that geography are learning to associate American OSS with American tech companies and US government. This could deepen the old free/libre vs open source divide that seems to have polarized along the separation by the Atlantic ocean. If so, in a time where Americans may be soon hea…

I don't think anyone is confused about American OSS and American corporations run amok with wealth accumulation and regulatory capture. It's a European conference held at a time when governments are waking up to the realization that foreign-owned proprietary software is a bad idea, and the idea of "digital sovereignty" has been around for a bit and did not originate at FOSDEM. The governments also seem to understand…

"the idea of 'digital sovereignty' has been around for a bit and did not originate at FOSDEM."

I would say it is around since the creation of the networked computer.

Remember the debate on about centralized mainframes vs home computers?

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

#210

Post by aapoalas »

Sesse__ wrote: post #180
direwolf20 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

F.ex. they didn't do postgresql and other DBs separately but instead just had a databases room.
Post reply on HN