FOSDEM

The Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM) is, well, an annual conference for FOSS developers from across Europe. It aims to bring together open-source communities, and this year, 2026, was my first time joining in on the fun.

I was granted the wonderful opportunity to attend FOSDEM 2026, which takes place in Brussels, because I joined as part of a company trip through my student position. This meant that beyond attending talks, I was also representing the company in conversations and on the lookout for relevant projects, technologies, and potential collaborations. Given that my company both uses and contributes to free and open-source software, FOSDEM provided an ideal environment for this kind of engagement.

The conference takes place over two days at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) and offers an extensive range of talks across many domains. As this was my first time attending, I focused on exploring a variety of topics. Some particularly memorable sessions included Finding Backdoors with Fuzzing and its follow-up on integrating automatic backdoor detection into CI pipelines, as well as talks on securing the software supply chain in the public sector, reverse engineering Spotify, and building a microkernel-based operating system from scratch. I also heard a talk by Daniel Stenberg, who is the founder and lead developer of cURL (an extremely popular tool). The breadth and technical depth of these presentations made it clear just how active and diverse the open-source ecosystem is.

In addition to attending talks, I had the chance to speak with some contributors and developers. One such conversation was with a speaker working on a fully open-source workstation stack in an effort to achieve digital sovereignty from (predominantly American) vendors—an approach closely aligned with the goals of the company I work for.

Overall, I feel very positively about this trip. I gained some insights into current developments in open-source software and cool and exciting projects as well as an opportunity to engage directly with the community. I also greatly enjoyed spending time in Brussels with my colleagues, and I am grateful to have been given the chance to be part of the experience.