Linux desktop is moving to a new era, ditching complex software spaghetti with years of tech debt with… a protocol? That's it? And you expect some compositor projects replace the almighty X server? Replace just the X server? When the protocol's the limit, we can do far more and far more fun stuff!
We'll explore some more-or-less obscure uses for Wayland compositors and an embedded case study how simple task of porting DOOM to a router ended up with making it run basically all modern Linux desktop apps with it for free, with Rust.
In 2026 the KDE project will turn 30, an extraordinary milestone in such a fast-paced ecosystem.
In this talk, we'll explore the challenges we have faced over the years and how the KDE community has adapted to stay relevant, continuing to deliver a good experience for people to use on their computers ranging across laptops, mobiles and even gaming consoles.
After glancing through our historical context, we'll discuss what's in store for KDE today and how we’re preparing for a bright and sustainable future in the evolving Free Software landscape.
Personal or professional - Linux on the desktop matters! It’s the daily interface between users and digital sovereignty – and it’s often put last. While Linux rules the cloud, servers, and mobile devices, the desktop is where control, compliance, and independence become tangible. This talk explores the current state of Linux on the desktop in Europe, with a focus on two real-world case studies from a leading automotive company and the German government. We’ll examine success stories, roadblocks, and new approaches like immutable Linux, zero-trust models, and EU-level OS initiatives. If we ignore the desktop, we risk leaving the front door of digital sovereignty wide open – or we can start where it matters most: every desk, every user, every day.
I've been part of migration projects most of my career, so in this talk I'll present some of the big picture items to consider when you are promoting the idea of migrations to Linux - such as politics, cost and practicality.
Thankfully the growing movement to cloud based applications has reduced Windows dependencies, so it is now easier than ever to migrate to a Linux based desktop solution.
I'll introduce you to someone called Horace and help you to get him to YES.
Why Office is not as easy as you might hope. Come and hear about office algorithms & data structures, as well as the interesting engineering challenges of interoperability from the Libre / Collabora Office experience.
Hear how many decades of accumulated backwards compatibility can make life particularly interesting. See why the temptation to start a new office suite from scratch overwhelms many people from time to time, and get some insights into the compromises that brings.
Hear about a code-base that has been loved over decades - through many tech fashions: from Java to component programming; from OS/2 to today's advertising subsidized platform of the future: the Web; from CADT methodology, to CRDT data structures; from bundled python to bundled databases.
Hear about the incredible lack of user focus that has plagued decisions and made many things worse.
Then hear our vision on driving FLOSS Office to take over the world and progress to date; see a number of pretty pixels to sooth your eyes chosen from the ergonomic beauty that is coming to make open source rock.
Finally hear how you can get involved with Collabora Online & LibreOffice.
Libreboot is a coreboot distribution — just as Debian is a Linux distribution — providing fully free (libre) boot firmware for x86 and ARM systems. It replaces proprietary BIOS/UEFI firmware, initializing hardware and starting your operating system. Linux and BSD operating systems are well supported.
Coreboot provides essential hardware initialization and then jumps to a payload program that boots your OS. Libreboot provides several payloads including, but not limited to, U-Boot, SeaBIOS and GRUB. Firmware images are provided pre-compiled, for ease of installation.
Libreboot began in 2013 and, as of September 2025, is an official Associated Project of Software in the Public Interest (SPI), joining long-established Free Software initiatives such as Debian. This talk will be presented by Leah Rowe, Libreboot’s founder and lead developer.
Firmware freedom is more critical than ever as we increasingly depend on computing, for participation in every aspect of civil society. Proprietary firmware endangers privacy, ownership, and repairability. Libreboot ensures that users truly control their hardware — protecting both user freedom and hardware longevity — while promoting a sustainable culture of hardware reuse.
Libreboot provides faster boot speeds, better security, and greater flexibility than typical proprietary firmware. Libreboot continues to provide updates — including security updates — long after vendors have dropped official support. The project’s philosophy is simple: you should keep using your hardware until you decide otherwise. Planned obsolescence is only a lack of imagination. Unlike the vendors, we will not try to control the users; our goal is to set you free!
This talk will trace Libreboot’s long-term development history, its current progress, and its future roadmap. This talk will also include a live demonstration showing how easy and affordable it is for non-technical users to build and install Libreboot via automation. Libreboot makes free firmware accessible, practical, and even fun, empowering even non-technical users to take back control.
At the time of this talk, Libreboot 25.12 (December 2025) also includes a Tianocore UEFI payload and extensive new hardware support — including hundreds of Chromebooks, several Intel Alder Lake platforms, and numerous Kaby Lake and Skylake ThinkPads. These additions, the result of sustained work throughout 2024 and 2025, mark a major expansion of Libreboot’s scope and capability.
Libreboot’s main code repositories are hosted at: https://codeberg.org/libreboot
Libreboot’s SPI association provides fiscal sponsorship, ensuring transparent management and legal protection for the project. Libreboot also receives corporate support from Minifree Ltd, operated by Leah Rowe, which provides computers pre-installed with Libreboot firmware.
Libreboot is a community project and we welcome every new contributor. Join us on Libera IRC (#libreboot) or via our SourceHut mailing list to participate.
At Wikimedia Foundation, we run Wikipedia, the world's favourite encyclopædia and one of the top ten websites of the Internet! No unicorns, just hardware, open source, and a small engineering org.
This talk pulls back the curtain on the stack that keeps Wikipedia fast, reliable, and resilient at global scale. Caching layers, databases, microservices, and Kubernetes are all stitched together to serve the world.
We'll also touch on how we've brought our 25-year-old monolith into the cloud-native era, and discuss the challenges we're navigating as the ongoing ~~rise of the machines~~ surge in LLM traffic changes the game.
In September and October 2025, RubyGems and Bundler, the clients and package registry for the Ruby language, had most of their maintainers removed by RubyCentral, the non-profit foundation that claimed ownership of these repositories. Since then, some of these repositories have been moved into the Ruby organisation and some of the ex-RubyGems maintainers have created an alternative hosting service, gem.coop.
I was a neutral party involved with initial mediation between RubyCentral and the maintainers before and during this transition and helped gem.coop bootstrap a governance process.
These events have much for non-Ruby projects to learn about non-profits, governance, money and access in open-source and I will share my learnings without taking any particular side in the disputes.
Upgrading high load PostgreSQL databases is a challenge on its own. When having customers around the globe with tight SLAs, the requirement arises to execute these upgrades with minimal or even no downtime at all. This talk shares GitLab's journey from multi-hour maintenance windows to truly zero-downtime upgrades for our PostgreSQL infrastructure. You'll learn the battle-tested techniques we've developed over the last 4 years, like how we execute PostgreSQL major upgrades and OS (glibc) upgrades at the same time, prevent data corruption, as well as always keeping a rollback path via reverse replication. We'll walk through real production examples, the gotchas we discovered, and the tooling we built. Whether you're managing a single HA cluster or a global fleet, you'll leave with actionable strategies to minimize (or eliminate) downtime during your next major upgrade.
1000 years ago in the Package Management devroom at FOSDEM 2018 I gave a talk entitled "How To Make Package Managers Cry", where I presented a range of techniques that open source software projects can apply to make the life of package managers utterly miserable.
In many ways, the world is a different place since then... Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that this was just the tip of the iceberg. Open source enthusiasts have come up with many more and even better ideas!
Come and learn about the creative yet tremendously effective ways in which open source software projects (and the broader ecosystem) have taken things to the next level to make package managers scream.
You may also get to know a couple of tools that (for some reason) try to counter these best practices, to great dismay of the open source software community.
If you too want to make package managers scream, don't miss this talk...
The integration of Open Source Software (OSS) in functionally safe systems represents a critical intersection of innovation and compliance requirements across multiple industries. This talk examines two complementary aspects of this evolving landscape: the current state of OSS in functional safety applications and the persistent barriers hindering wider adoption.
2024/2025 have marked significant acceleration in the visibility and adoption of OSS in safety-critical environments, with diverse projects demonstrating varying levels of maturity. Foundation-backed initiatives like the ELISA project within the Linux Foundation are establishing frameworks for Linux in safety applications, while specialized operating systems such as Zephyr and Xen continue to gain traction. The Eclipse Foundation's Safe Open Vehicle Core (S-Core) project represents another significant advancement, aiming to create a common certifiable automotive middleware stack that addresses critical safety requirements. The ecosystem now spans from microkernel solutions like L4Re and seL4 to full-featured platforms, with Linux serving as a prime example of the opportunities and challenges in this space. Infrastructure improvements like the SPDX safety profile address critical aspects of safety documentation in Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs), while safety-certified components like the Ferrocene Rust compiler create new possibilities for language-level safety guarantees.
Despite this progress, substantial barriers impede broader OSS adoption in functionally safe systems. A particularly persistent challenge remains the confusion around terminology and approaches - exemplified by the distinctions between "safety Linux" versus "safe Linux" that illustrate broader issues in how safety responsibility is allocated between OSS components and system-level mitigations. By examining architectural concepts currently implemented in production systems or under development, this talk cuts through marketing rhetoric to provide clear distinctions between approaches across various open source technologies.
The author will address uncertainty around certification pathways, challenges in establishing sufficient evidence for safety arguments, fragmented governance models, and incomplete understanding of OSS development processes among safety assessors.
Attendees will gain practical insights for evaluating safety approaches in OSS-based systems, including key questions to ask when assessing different safety concepts across industries, with particular emphasis on applications where both manufacturers and suppliers are seeking to implement open source software in safety-critical production systems.
Links to relevant example projects as part of the talk are available in the resources.
All programming languages have their foundations: the engine that interprets your code and makes everything run. In PHP, this is the Zend Engine, a critical piece of software that powers millions of applications worldwide. When everything works, you don’t even think about it. You deploy to production, and the engine does its magic behind the scenes.
But what happens when something goes wrong in that core? What if a subtle bug opens the door to a full security breach? Suddenly, the invisible foundation becomes the most important part of the story.
Let’s shine a light on two such cases: a recent, real vulnerability in the PHP engine (which has since been patched), and a backdoor that, just a few years ago, actually made it into the release candidate and allowed remote code execution. We’ll walk through how each issue could be exploited and, most importantly, what lessons developers can draw from them. And yes, there will be live, local, sandboxed demos of both exploits in action. Ready to dive in?
This talk is about how risk and control moves through the computational stack, from transistors to firmware, from chip monopolies to satellite networks, from invisible maintainers to AI accelerators. We'll walk through the failures that mattered: Heartbleed. Log4Shell. Spectre. The Garmin ransomware attack. The XZ backdoor. Not because they broke things, but because they showed us where power actually lives, and how fragile those concentrations really are.
Every one of those failures revealed something: how physical constraints shape digital power, how a single unpaid maintainer can hold up half the internet, how optimization culture erodes resilience. They showed us that nations, economies, and individual freedom now depend on infrastructure most people will never see.
But here's the thing: Open Source built that infrastructure. And Open Source can reshape it. This is about understanding where we are, how we got here, and what it means to build systems that distribute power instead of concentrating it. Because the people who write the code should be the ones who decide how it works, and who it works for.
Spotify is the world's largest music streaming service, yet it has never fullfilled the flexibility and platform support needs of the ones enjoying home automation, open streamers and more. For over a decade, the librespot family of projects has been filling that void through reverse engineering of Spotify's products.
This talk takes you through one of the longest-running efforts to open up the Spotify ecosystem. We'll explore the technical approaches used to reverse engineer the official clients, the evolution of the project as Spotify's architecture changed, and the delicate balance of operating in legal grey areas while keeping the open source project alive.
All of this brought to you by the maintainer of go-librespot and memeber of librespot-org.
The promise of smartphones was freedom in your pocket. The reality? Two corporate gatekeepers controlling what software billions of users can run on devices they supposedly own. This talk examines the uncomfortable compromises FLOSS developers face when trying to distribute apps through iOS and Android app stores, where every principle we hold dear—user freedom, privacy, transparency, and community control—runs headlong into the profit-driven interests of the global mobile duopoly.
We'll explore the battleground where free software principles meet platform restrictions: mandatory code signing that undermines reproducible builds, opaque review processes that can arbitrarily reject apps exercising user freedom, 30% revenue cuts that punish sustainable FLOSS funding models, and Terms of Service that can revoke your ability to distribute software overnight. The Digital Markets Act promised to open these walled gardens, but has it? Or have we merely traded one gatekeeper's rules for slightly different ones?
This isn't just about technical hurdles—it's about fundamental questions. Should FLOSS projects compromise on GPL compliance to reach users? Is it ethical to pay fees and developer taxes when that money funds the very infrastructure restricting user freedom? When F-Droid and alternative app stores offer true freedom but reach only 2% of users, do we accept the compromise or maintain ideological purity while our potential impact dwindles?
The stakes are existential. As our digital lives increasingly occur on locked-down mobile devices, FLOSS becomes the last line of defense against surveillance capitalism, planned obsolescence, and the erosion of user agency. If we can't effectively distribute free software on the platforms where users actually are, we risk relegating FLOSS to irrelevance precisely when it's needed most.
But there's hope. New regulatory frameworks, emerging alternative stores, advances in progressive web apps, and creative technical solutions offer paths forward. We'll discuss practical strategies for maximizing reach while minimizing compromise, building communities that value freedom over convenience, and preparing for a post-duopoly future.
This talk will challenge both the compromisers and the purists, asking uncomfortable questions: Are we collaborating with platforms that fundamentally oppose our values? Or are we pragmatically meeting users where they are? The answer may determine whether free software thrives or withers in the mobile era.
The Free and Open Source ecosystem has continued to evolve and adapt itself despite an ever-changing landscape that, paradoxically, seems to find pleasure in threatening its very own fabric.
And yet our resilience won't be able to sustain another direct hit, this time coming from the fact that Open Source lives at odds with the UX/UI Design Process.
Open Source, both as a social contract and as a practice, cannot afford not to fully own the strategic space that dictates how we connect with end users.
In this talk I will explain why this has become so crucial and why, while open-source developers are the most likely audience to suffer the most if this is not dealt with, they are also the most naturally equipped to lead a new design&code worldwide alliance.
FreeSewing is an open source project that provides a core (Javascript) library for designing parametric sewing patterns, as well as a growing collection of designs and supporting tools. We've been around for more than a decade, and in that time have built a large user base among the maker community.
FreeSewing designs are implemented as code giving you unmatched power and flexibility. You can mix and match parts from different designs, extend them, or add options that turn one base design into many. Our choice for Javascript means you can run all of this in your browser. Suffice to say, these are not your grandma's sewing patterns.
This talk will cover why I started FreeSewing, the pain points it aims to address, and how it works under the hood. I'll also cover our tech stack, and the choices we've made in this area, as well as how we needed to adapt as we outgrew our earlier choices. In addition, I'll cover some of the lessons learned after more than a decade of designing parametric sewing patterns for bodies in all shapes and forms. I will also include tips for running an open source project for a prolonged period of time while avoiding the pitfalls of maintainer burn-out.
I'll bring some cool swag too.
The story “Ada & Zangemann – A Tale of Software, Skateboards and Raspberry Ice Cream” inspires the software freedom community because it covers more than the simple value of learning to program. It also covers the importance of control over technology and its impact on society. In this way the story is inspiring many kids, teens, parents and many others to learn programming and shape technology.
I too was captivated by the story. Working on a Dutch translation sent me down the path of improving the automation to help others like me to translate the story and publish it in different formats. The free culture license of the book enables and compels the community to adapt it, and they have. The community keeps surprising us with new formats to convey the story. Since its release it has been translated into 30 languages, published as a book in 7 and as movie in 5. And it is available in a growing number of other formats: epub, online book, bilingual book and kamishibai.
Translation and localization is the primary purpose of the automation. More interesting and ambition is to support the increasing number of formats: from printed book, to online book, voiceover text and subtitles. This wide variety of formats presents a unique challenge for which no ready-made solution exists. By leveraging open standards (XML, Docbook, ITS) and Free Software (Scribus, itstool, gettext, xsltproc, pandoc, Weblate) we created automation that enables translators to add new languages while also enabling new formats to be added. This includes a novel method for inserting text and images into Scribus. This multi-media setup can be used as inspiration for other free culture multi-media projects.
In this presentation we will tell the story how the automation developed over time. We'll share the inspiring stories from the community that leveraged the automation and influenced its development. The technical challenge of the automation is fun, but the community stories give it meaning and motivate me to keep at it.
With this presentation we hope to inspire others to contribute to the Ada & Zangemann community by translating, adding a new format or contributing to the automation and to share own materials benefiting our community as Open Educational Resources.
At the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), we envision an ecosystem of open mapping technology that enables everyone, and in particular vulnerable communities, to make open map data available in order to use in disaster response and humanitarian context. We focus on building with our community and involving our users in every step of the process.
In this session, we would like to take you on a journey in introducing the full end-to-end open mapping workflow and the open source tools enabling that process - from the newly developed Drone Tasking Manager to fAIr (our AI assisted mapping service), Field Tasking Manager, ChatMap and uMap. We will share some stories from case studies in testing the end to end mapping workflow in Indonesia and Sierra Leone and the lessons learnt.
We hope that you will leave this talk inspired and with an understanding on how YOU can become part of the open mapping ecosystem and contribute to the technology development!
HOTOSM website: https://www.hotosm.org/tech-suite HOTOSM Github: https://github.com/hotosm
Btrfs was merged into the Linux kernel in 2009, arriving with bold promises—and, let's be honest, a reputation for instability. I first tried it on my laptop in 2011. It wiped my data. Twice. On the bright side, it taught me the value of backups.
Fast forward to 2025: btrfs is no longer the experimental filesystem of the past. It's stable, mature, feature-rich, and fully part of the Linux kernel. But old reputations die hard. Even today, Google Cloud Platform doesn’t officially support it—not because of technical shortcomings, but because customer demand hasn’t pushed the issue.
At Chronosphere, we decided to take a fresh look. After months of evaluation and testing, we migrated petabytes of customer data across thousands of disks to btrfs. This talk is our story: why we made the leap, what we learned along the way, and how we’re helping bring btrfs into wider enterprise adoption—including working with Google to support it natively.
I'll share the decision-making process, key performance and reliability insights, and the quirks you only discover when running btrfs at scale. Whether you're btrfs-curious or just love a good ops tale, you'll walk away with real-world takeaways—and maybe a newfound respect for this once-maligned filesystem.
If you know what NTFS, ext4, or ZFS are, you’re ready for this journey.
In an era where our identities and rights are increasingly mediated by devices we call “phones”, the boundaries between digital citizenship and corporate feudalism are blurring. This talk explores the intersection of technology, autonomy, and community within the unique context of transformational festivals, temporary autonomous zones (TAZs) (or future isolated neightborhoods and local communities?) where experimentation and reappropriation of tools take center stage.
Starting from a cyberpunk reflection — high tech, low life — the talk questions how much of that dystopian vision has already become reality: from algorithmic control to the loss of privacy and digital dependency. Drawing on the legacy of radio as an anarchic medium and the new rise of mesh networks such as Meshtastic/Meshcore/Reticulum, The Things Network, and Helium, Davide Gomba connects past and future: from Marconi lighting up the Cristo Redentor in 1931 to today’s decentralized communication protocols.
Through examples from Lutopia’s “Ozorian Experiment” (2024) and the ongoing Burning Mesh initiative, the talk presents how off-grid communication can become both a poetic and political act - reclaiming connection, rebuilding resilience, and teaching new forms of digital literacy. Between cyberpunk dystopia and techno-anarchic optimism, “The Meshiverse OR The Revolution of the Little Radios” is a manifesto for the right to communicate freely - even, and especially, when the network goes dark.