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'

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ignoramous 8 hours ago | parent [-]

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 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> 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.