FOSDEM 2026 returns to Brussels, Belgium at the end of this month (January 31 to February 1) with a schedule that leans heavily into the real-world pressures facing the FOSS community.
Beyond the technical tracks that throngs of tech enthusiasts, developers and engineers come for is a set of keynote talks that focus on the rise of ‘adversarial’ AI and the sustainability of open source funding.
While there is plenty of room for celebration, including a talk on 30 years of KDE, and innovation around core components in the desktop stack, there’s also a focus on ‘digital sovereignty’ amidst wider geopolitical shifts.
Running annually since 2000, FOSDEM (‘Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting’) grows in popularity each year, attracting as many as 10,000 attendees.
FOSDEM is, as ever, free to attend. Just turn up on the day as no registration is required. Such an open approach is core to an event all about open collaboration.
Talks at FOSDEM 2026
AI is a focus in keynote talks “FOSS in times of war, scarcity and (adversarial) AI“ and “Open Source Security in spite of AI“, as well as a topic touched on in other tracks, such as “What do we mean when we say Sovereign AI?“ by privacy activist Katharine Jarmul.
FOSS funding is a common theme throughout scores of talks, notably in keynote “Free as in Burned Out: Who Really Pays for Open Source“. As its sardonic title suggests, this talk tackles the need for honest answers to sustainability in open source.
For a European crowd, the subjects of AI and funding in open-source are timely. The EU has never been as bullish on bolstering the continent’s digital sovereignty and reducing its reliance on US tech giants as it is today.
Open source is a key part of those plans, something Daniel Izquierdo and Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona address in their talks on “The Geopolitics of Code: From Digital Sovereignty to Global Fragmentation“.
Plenty of lighter content too
FOSDEM 2026 is not all existential opines and rallying cries for action. Plenty of talks tackle progress, initiatives and upcoming changes that will be of interest to regular desktop users – if only indirectly.
KDE’s Aleix Pol is delivering a talk on KDE at 30; Leah Rowe is giving an overview (and live demo) of Libreboot; and Collabora’s Michael Meeks is laying out the ‘challenges of FLOSS Office Suites‘ in interoperability, design and maintenance.
The Graphics DevRoom at FOSDEM 2026 sees talks on window managers after Xorg; the new Rust-based Tyr NVIDIA graphics driver; and a history and overview of Mesa (most of us use it, but we probably don’t know much about how it works).
Plenty more besides that since there’s a giddying 71 tracks stuffed with talks that touch on everything from FOSS on mobile and RISC-V hardware, through to music production, the Fediverse, and Nix. Unless you’re really fussy, there will something to interest, I’m sure.
Human events are a lifeblood
With Canonical again relegating Ubuntu Summit to an online largely hagiographic event, in-person fixtures like FOSDEM are important to ensure the messy, human connections that spark between talks, in hallways, and in hotels, isn’t lost.
If you have plans for next weekend (January 31 to February 1), cancel ’em. If you can’t be in Brussels for the real thing, you can stream many FOSDEM talks live, peruse the schedule and make notes on what to catch live – and what to catch up on after1.
Are you attending FOSDEM 2026? Have you been to a FOSDEM before? Will you be setting an alarm to tune into a specific talk? Let me know in the comments.
- Most talks end up uploaded to YouTube in the weeks and months after the event. ↩︎
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