Bleh, sponsored by google, no thx.
So far the big names haven’t steered the agenda. At least I have not atrended any talks or watched them remotely where the influence of any big tech company could be noticed or assumed.
The infra must be a huge challenge for such a large conference without admission fees or even prior registration. Someone has to foot the bills. Would be better if it were funded by a government institution but this is what we have.
There will be a sea of Mac laptops and probably a bunch of vibe coders. Plus, it won’t be streamed to contribute a maximum to carbon emissions. Yay.
Are the talks not recorded for this year? They traditionally have been. There have been years where it was streamed too. Can’t remember for 2026.
There are few places I know of where I’ll find people running Linux on their phone or on their Mac too. You’ll surely find people running some BSD, MacOS, Windows or whatnot as well as those running Linux on their laptops.
FOSDEM has had the highest amount of FOSS OS use and rooted devices over any conference I’ve been to.
You’ll surely find vibe coders or people using LLMs as is the case everywhere today. You’ll also find people deep into the field talking about shaving bytes off a Python interpreter to fit it on a small chip or talking about high level database abstractions or the bluetooth stack in the Linux kernel because they implemented part of it. But sure, it’s huge. You’ll find others too. Some will learn, some will leave.
It is not perfect but there’s substantially worse places to be to learn about FOSS subcommunities.
It is streamed and recorded for years unless I am missing something. Last year was no different:
That reflects my experience as well.
Was it the case last year? I haven’t been in a while, but last time I was there it was definitely more people running Arch on Thinkpads than MacBooks.
My experience was turning around while sitting at the front and seeing nearly exclusively CrApple logos. I left the event with he impression that the only people being able to pay to show up to the event were Mac owners.
FOSDEM is free to attend. There is no registration. Just turn up!
But Fosdem is free and Brussels is a cheap city, so I don’t see why people would have to “be able to pay to show up”?
In my experience there are very wide differences in audience between sessions, and I mostly see people with beards and ThinkPads, for my part.
Not everybody lives in Brussels?
Well of course, but it’s probably one of the easiest cities to reach for the most people, given its location. It’s not like it was in Perth or Irkutsk, Brussels is not per se an expensive place to reach, and most visitors are probably just from France, Benelux or Germany.
Easy doesn’t mean cheap. And not everybody can take of work to visit. I know I can’t.
I know but… Fosdem is still one the cheapest conferences to attend all things considered, and on a weekend so most people don’t need to take time off, so I just don’t get your comment about having money. It’s clearly not targeted at rich people is what I mean, and not attended especially by people who can afford a mac. But some sessions are probably more attractive to a certain type of attendee than others.
