FOSDEM 2025

It’s… Huge.

On the 1st and 2nd of February, 11 of our team went to the Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting. This is an epic two-day conference with over 1000 talks (and something like 8,000 attendees) hosted in Brussels. It’s really huge.

It’s so huge, in fact, that there are a good few “fringe events” in the days before and after the main conference. Some of those events are important in themselves. We also attended a few of these, but those are for other blog posts.

Photo: S. Cunliffe, CC-BY-SA-NC 4.0

The main FOSDEM conference is free (as in free beer) and it is all about progress in free (as in freedom) software and Open Source. It’s not just the code that’s open source, but also research, education, organisation development…

UCL ARC gave three talks (1, 2, 3) about our open-source work in research software for medicine and high-performance computing in particle physics.

Did we mention how big the conference is? Well, it’s so big that different people can attend the same event and have a really vastly different conference. Here are a couple of different versions of FOSDEM…

Sam

I spent most of my time in the “open research” talks and the Python developers’ talks. These are two of my favourite things to listen to talks about. So I attended a conference about Sam’s favourite open-source things, which was excellent. My personal highlights were this talk about the digitisation of manuscripts, this talk about the NHS developers’ experience making the UK’s COVID tracing app in the open, and a Python talk about how JavaScript is really weird . I took away some tooling and other ideas that I’ve already managed to start using in my working life in collaborative ARC projects.

Camilla

I tailored my FOSDEM choices to open infrastructure (my job), the linux kernel (professional interest) and the GIMP (nostalgia). Compared with other conferences, I found the talks at FOSDEM to be pitched to a much broader audience; people aren’t just talking to their fellow practitioners, they’re also talking to their neighbors who wandered into the room because their first choice talk was too crowded. The atmosphere was jovial and friendly! People were eager to give away stickers, enamel pins, and leftover bits of waffles, and they didn’t even want to put me on a mailing list. Hopefully, I can come back to FOSDEM to report on my work in the future. Next time I’ll buy someone else a waffle.

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That’s it for now, stay tuned for others’ blog posts in the next few days!