[benou]

> What is the FOSDEM community's answer to the real concerns that these changes pose ? Let's hand solder raspberry pis ! let's self host LLMS from 2 years ago on FreeBSD ! Look, i can run wasn linux on this risc-v cpu !

Maybe, just maybe, they're having fun? FOSS is not only about corporate open-source, but also genuine curiosity. Both can have their place.

> no wonder that nobody younger than 40 was attending the conference. The next generation is doing something else and rightly so.

I saw a lot of students at FOSDEM, attending, presenting and helping the at organization.

[fvdessen]

OSS original point wasn't just to have fun among nerds, but to have a real impact on the world. Fun and curiosity is fine, but there's a line where it becomes a tech themed larp event, and FOSDEM is trending towards the later.

Corporate Open Source should have its place at FOSDEM. The linux dinosaur companies such as Redhat are still there. But what about the new ones ? What about Mistral, Odoo ? Even the 'evil' ones such as facebook, github, etc, aren't they contributing a lot of open software ? Aren't they more relevant than let's say Olimex ?

There were some students, yes but the attendence is growing old, and the chit chat is more about 'remember this and that' than 'we're building the future'

[ignoramous]

Looking at the talk lineup of a LLM related devroom, it sounds forward looking to me: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/track/ai/

> but to have a real impact on the world.

I did find devrooms, stands, and main track talks on this.

> Even the 'evil' ones such as facebook, github, etc, aren't they contributing a lot of open software

Google is one of the two lead financial sponsors of FOSDEM (the other being RedHat). So clearly, there doesn't seem to be any restriction or judgement by the organizers on whether BigTech is 'evil'. I get that Jack Dorsey (of Square/Block) withdrew his main track talk the year prior, which was unfortunate.

> the chit chat is more about 'remember this and that' than 'we're building the future'

Well, for better or for worse, FOSDEM is not exclusively a tech start-up event.

[fvdessen]

> Looking at the talk lineup of a LLM related devroom, it sound forward looking to me: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/track/ai/

It doesn't to me at all, it is mainly focused on self hosting llms, which is a complete deadend. It just isn't feasible to self host the useful models, the hardware requirements are just too big.

The current topic of focus around AI are: how to adapt development practice to agentic coding, agent harness, agent orchestration, mcp integrations, etc.

I guess there is some unease in the oss community to rely on large companies to run and host the models. But this isn't entirely new, we also relied on big companies to manufacture our computers. It's just the way it is.

> Well, for better or for worse, FOSDEM is not a tech start-up event.

It is weird, there are a lot of startups present, look at all the stands showcasing projects. Aren't those startups ? What I noticed is that they are usually funded by public grants rather than VCs. I am not sure why this is the case.

[direwolf20]

I met several people self–hosting LLMs including a man from Tenstorrent demonstrating their accelerator card.

> What I noticed is that they are usually funded by public grants rather than VCs. I am not sure why this is the case.

American VC culture derives from America's privileged position in the global financial system. It can't be replicated by a country that doesn't have a ton of money floating around looking for investments.

Second reason: nobody likes what American VC culture created, so they don't want it to be replicated. Government grant funding can make decisions on axes other than profitability.

[menaerus]

Public grants are nice but they have couple of shortcomings and which is why they can get you only that far. They are normally low in capital, the execution is really slow (couple of months to one year), and larger grants too involve politics. The process is too formal (inflexible and too time-consuming) and also quite discriminating to individuals/small-groups who do have the big ideas but are not running the business already (I mean how can they). Proposal evaluation also has its own shortcomings - there's very little incentive for the actual experts to join the evaluation process (it's paid pennies) and generally speaking this leads to another chicken&egg problem - you're presenting something novel to the pool of people who might not have the capacity to understand the idea - neither the vision nor execution.

That said, I am not attracted to the VC culture but their process delivers the value which creates successful companies.

[direwolf20]

NLNET is always coming up at FOSDEM. Since they have a decent track record of issuing grants, the EU delegates them some money to use in their own less bureaucratic granting process. They call this "cascade funding". NLNET has funded a lot of random individual projects you can find on their website. Nominally, your proposal must have something to do with their goals.

This year there is more emphasis on bringing complete solutions to market. Previously they were funding much more experimentation.

[imtringued]

I think the one out of touch is you. Do you really think that depending on proprietary third party services is in the spirit of open source software? You didn't just say people should depend on proprietary models, whose output could at least be considered open source, you're talking about "vibe coding platforms" like lovable, which contain an unavoidable proprietary infrastructure component.

You're also engaging in historical revisionism. "5 years ago" means you're expecting everyone to have jumped on Github Copilot on day one or else they're behind. LLM assisted software development only really took off in the last three years and even then you were still a trailblazer.

[ongy]

Iirc. Jack was accepted by the organizers but pressured out by the community.

Also, about github: Had a chat with the Gitlab chap doing the Git talk in the main track. Apparently they dialed back their involvement with upstream git quite a bit. Github is currently providing a lot of infra gratis (thanks!) but is at best neutral to code and community.

[direwolf20]

I believe anti–bigtech talks are quietly rejected due to the corporate sponsorship. OFFDEM is an anti–bigtech fork of FOSDEM.