What we learned at FOSDEM 2025

FOSDEM is the world’s largest open source conference that’s held every year at the ULB Solbosch Campus in Brussels, Belgium. So, of course the OpenSSL Foundation was there. FOSDEM is a free conference that’s entirely created and run by volunteers. One member of our team, Tomas Mraz, was a co-organizer of the Security Devroom. Amy Parker volunteered for a shift at the Information Desk, where she sold t-shirts and accepted donations from attendees who wanted to support FOSDEM.

We also went to many talks. These are our favorites:

• VPP TLS Plugin: Performance Enhancement With User Space Processing & Pipeline Support— Venkata Ravichandra Mynidi and Varun Rapelly from Marvell Technology Inc presented a fascinating case study in using OpenSSL’s TLS pipelining capability to enhance performance. After the talk Matt Caswell met with the speakers. It turns out Matt largely wrote the pipelining feature in OpenSSL that they were using in the VPP TLS Plugin they talked about.

• Tightening every bolt—Daniel Stenberg’s summarized the things that the curl project does to ensure that their code is secure.
• Kintsugi: A Decentralized E2EE Key Recovery Protocol—Emilie Ma discussed a decentralized recovery protocol for end-to-end encrypted data.
• Ten Years as a Free, Open, and Automated Certificate Authority—Josh Aas gave an informative talk about the Let’s Encrypt Certificate Authority history and current state of things.
• Open source funding: you’re doing it wrong—Andrew Nesbitt and Benjamin Nickolls delivered an entertaining talk filled with data about the divergence between the frequency projects are used and the funding given to them.

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• When is it Right to Say No to Funding?—Karen Sandler, Executive Director of Software Freedom Conservancy spoke about the reality that not all offers of funding are in the best interest of our organizations and projects, and she gave insights into when saying “no” to a donation is the right answer.
• 20 Years of Hacking the Funding of XWiki and CryptPad–Ludovic Dubost, Creator of XWiki and CEO of XWiki SAS, shared how revenue has grown and the revenue mixture has changed over 20 years of his project.
• Open Source Governance for Software Engineers—Tobie Langel presented a way of looking at organizing the governance of a project in a way that not only makes sense for developers, but also works as a practical model for all sorts of organizations.

We also had this cute sticker that we spread around among participants, whenever we could.