> 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.
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'
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> This year there is more emphasis on bringing complete solutions to market. Previously they were funding much more experimentation.
That's the step in the right direction however there's what I believe is a major issue with the NLNET scheme - there is no fastrack possibility for really great ideas with very potent market impact - you have to spend (lose) ~year to prove your idea is worthy by applying to Zero Commons or similar grant instead of just getting the 200-500k to really get the project hitting the ground.
One year is exceptionally long period in tech, and if the idea is right, you need to have all the resources to execute it - working solely on the project for the whole year for 50,000 EUR is simply not the strategy that can work out in a highly competitive (world) space.
How should they know your project is worth investing 500k? I heard they've got 3x8M, per year I presume, so 500k is a huge chunk of that. Everyone thinks their project is worth 500k, what makes yours different from the rest?
> How should they know your project is worth investing 500k? I heard they've got 3x8M, per year I presume, so 500k is a huge chunk of that. Everyone thinks their project is worth 500k, what makes yours different from the rest?
Well that's the job of VCs, that's what they're expert at.
There's also another model where established industrial communities set up research centers to fund projects that might help their common problems.
Yes, many might believe that their project is worth more than it really is but in my proposition authors of the idea are not the ones who get to decide that but people from NLNET or whatever grant. What I am saying is that currently there is no such process at all and this is a foundational problem with the way how these grants are working.
I guess not. Can you specify it in more concrete terms? They're not just buying your project for an arbitrary price, or VC-investing, they're paying your living costs and hosting costs while you create a donation to the public good, that's how grants work.
They give you 500k if you have a really good reason why you need that... and why the result is worth it... and why your project is more worth it than all the other several projects, combined, they could spend the same 500k on. Most of them are one or two people's living cost for 6 months to a year or so.
I genuinely hope you're a bot. If you're not then please consider being respectful in your conversations and address the question being asked rather than moving goalposts - it is extremely annoying. If you're out of your arguments, learn to say "I don't know".
And I also do hope, if you're a human, that you're not sitting anywhere close to decision making committee be it in NLNET or any other grant program because if you do, it fits into the (terrible) narrative of software market in the EU.
Ad hominem does not apply to bots or trolls and you're one of those two. And I'm not sure what was ad hominem about my response. You're the one being ignorant here
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.
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.
My experience was good: on my way in Paris -> Brussels arrived 10min early, and on my way out Brussels -> Paris I had ~15min delay (apparently because Police had to board the train before Brussels).
1) use a specialized distribution (I use yunohost but there are others). This makes configuring SPF, DKIM, TLS and more a breeze
2) use a reputable relay to send your emails (I use OVH but again there are plenty of other choices)
Of course it means you are not "pure" because emails you send will go trough a 3rd party (the relay) but it solved the delivery issue entirely for me, so that I can continue to benefit from all the other benefits of self-hosting.
I'm self-hosting my mail server without a relay. It is still possible, you just need to be persistent. In the beginning Microsoft might just let your mails vanish and while they won't confirm this when you contact them doing so eventually resolved my delivery issues with their mail servers. With Google I didn't have any issues.
Do you run Yunohost in production? Did you consider Cloudron/Coolify/etc.? I use Yunohost for personal services, it's extremely robust, but has a few lacking features that you'd expect to have in more professional setups.
Yep, AI scrapers have been breaking our open-source project gerrit instance hosted at Linux Network Foundation.
Why this is the case while web-crawlers have been scrapping the web for the last 30 years is a mystery to me. This should be a solved problem. But it looks like this field is full of wrongly behaving companies with complete disregards toward common goods.
>Why this is the case while web-crawlers have been scrapping the web for the last 30 years is a mystery to me.
a mix of ignorance, greed, and a bit of the tragedy of the commons. If you don't respect anyone around you, you're not going to care about any rules or ettiquite that don't directly punish you. Society has definitely broken down over the decades.
These days (with recent kernels) you don't even have to copy the qemu binary into the rootfs nor use a static binary - these used to be workarounds for things that kernel now handles on its own.
Well technically you can't, in the sense that chroot has no idea you're doing it... the magic of binfmt support in the kernel (setup for qemu by the post-install script for qemu-user-static I believe) basically lets you run any architecture's binary that qemu-user-* supports just by trying to execute it natively, it basically just translates the execution of "./other-arch-cmd" into "qemu-user-static ./other-arch-cmd".
Thank you. That makes sense. Even though there is a translation layer via qemu-user-static, still having the facilities to have that transparently is very fantastic. And also very fascinating and a revelation to learn about for a bearded old timer like me who has never seen it before.
I still use my Thinkpad x61 as my daily driver (typing on it right now) and I don't feel most of the "severe limitations" you are listing.
I think some are wrong (eg. I use Dual-band AC wifi and BT4.0 wifi card in mine, and have a 2.5" SATA-II (3Gbps) SSD), and others are not limitation for my use.
I won't recommend it to everyone, mind you, but for my use it is perfect.
Hah. Thanks. I was stopping by this thread again to post exactly that. I have to say that config option was not obvious. After scrolling through about:config and filtering only the modified list I still couldn't find it. I finally backed up prefs.js, toggled it, then pulled a diff.
And, I needed the config entry because I couldn't find any gui option to opt out of it on mobile.
In a similar vein, the "Confrérie des Charitables de Saint-Éloi" was founded in Béthune (France) in 1188 during a plague epidemy and is still active today.
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