FOSDEM’26 Highlights

Another fantastic FOSDEM conference is in the books, and we’re reflecting on a few of our favorite sessions from this year. The volunteers who organize FOSDEM do a great job of selecting terrific talks and quickly posting recordings of every session. Click on any of the talk titles below to learn more about the sessions and view the recordings. 

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Burnout in Open Source: A Structural Problem We Can Fix Together

Tomáš Mráz – “I recommend watching this session to everyone who feels that long term maintenance of an open source project can be done just as a hobby. Having a good work-life balance and feeling well rewarded for their hard work is just as important to open source developers as to anyone else.”

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Open Source Security in Spite of AI

Daniel Kubec - “I enjoyed the talk for its perspective from another relevant open-source security project, especially the contrast between denial-of-service risks caused by sloppy, AI-generated noise overwhelming maintainers and the promise of new AI-powered tools that can uncover flaws in existing code in ways no previous analyzers could.”

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The Russian Censorship Circumvention, Tom’s Traps, and Jerry’s VPN: A 5-Year Journey

Igor Ustinov - “When developing information security tools, we usually don't see our opponents, but rather think of some abstract 'intruder' who might try this or that. Thanks to this talk, I had the opportunity to experience the real-life story of IT security professionals' confrontation with a decidedly more powerful adversary.”

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Evolving Git for the next decade

Richard Levitte – “A well rounded view of what’s to come with the tool that we all depend on.  I found it particularly interesting when they talked about jujitsu (a competing but git-compatible version control tool), and how that inspires some useful additions to git itself.”

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Verification of Linux kernel code

Matt Caswell – “I enjoyed this session which explored how formal verification techniques could be applied to the Linux kernel. It provided some actual examples of how verification works and the process of moving from a specification to a proof of correctness.”

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Modern Network Protocols — What’s Next for Firefox and the Web?

Ryan Hooper - "Coming from a secure network background, I found this to be a fantastic talk. It was great to hear how projects are utilizing QUIC and HTTP/3 for other network protocols. The performance metrics demonstrate that using a newer HTTP version provides significant speed improvements alongside increased security."

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The AI Shockwave in Open Source Communities: How AI Is Reshaping the Foundations of Open Source Communities

Jon Ericson - “I’d attended David Allen’s talk last year, Talking to Robots: Uses and Abuses of LLMs in Communities, but had some concerns about his suggestions for the health of online communities. This year David returned with his colleague at Grafana, Amanda Victoria Wagner, to disavow some of what he’d said last year after experiencing the hollowing out of their community due newcomers asking chatbots rather than humans.”

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This list is only a small selection of the hundreds of great talks presented over FOSDEM's two days. You can access many, many more through the full conference schedule.