It's organized by room which you can find here: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/tracks/
I'm gonna summarize the Varlink talk: DBus is, and I quote, "very very very complex" and his system with JSON for low-level IPC is, in fact, the best thing since sliced bread and has no significant flaws. It works basically just like HTTP so the web people will love it. Kernel support for more great shit pending! I'm not sure where the hardon for a new IPC system with lernel (keeping that typo) support is from, but he's been trying for 15 years now. AFAICT, the service discovery problem could be solved by a user space service without much trouble. I mean if the whole thing wasn't an exercise in bad technological taste.
You can see the progress schedule here: https://review.video.fosdem.org/overview
Easier to preview content before downloading
They had an opportunity there to restore the "Cookies are delicious delicacies" message [1] in a more appropriate context, but it seems that's not the sign they went with.
I think that it was better when most talks were 45 mins to 1h with deeper more advanced and senior content.
At the same time, with the overcrowded aspect, it becomes harder to socialize and meet people really involved in maintaining open source projects in my opinion. There are a lot lot lot more "users" on both sides (visitors and speakers) than what it used to be 10 years ago.
And questions and comments after talks was what was bringing the most value to the event. Compared to just watch a recording of a talk.
OTOH, 80% of the reason I go to talks is to see if the person has interesting things to say and grab them after the talk for a chat. I.e. it sucks for the remote experience, but I think for on-site it's fine to just talk more.
Gets harder if you consider the talks the main attraction, but I really see them more as hooks to talk to people about interesting topics.
Except in the H building.
You can't attend all 30+ tracks at once anyway, you need to see recordings afterwards anyway if you are remotely interested in consuming the conference. I'd say the experience is just as much about meeting the people behind all the internet handles, getting into a full lecture room one talk in advance and listening in to something you otherwise wouldn't, join something bigger than email lists and matrix rooms, it's a unique wibe you can't find anywhere else.
I wonder if it naturally regulates itself in the way that people who get fed up by the queues don't come back the next year. You can definitely start by adding measures to limit the capacity or whatnot, but in both cases you exclude a certain part of the potential participants. I think I'd rather keep the wibe and ensure people can at least experience it once, than start gatekeeping.
Also, the fries are good.
There's no way you can fully experience it or do it optimal.
It's really about making sure you get value out of it, listen to some interesting talks and meet some people.
The app had nice indicators of where the overcrowding was, though. It pushed me to less popular talks, where I discovered some hidden gems. I also came home with a big list of recordings to check out.
I got lost several times, in the previous editions I remember there were clear signs at every level to guide you to the rooms...
I always enjoyed chatting with people demoing SDR/small cool hardware hacks as a refreshing break from whatever high-tech presentation room I got stuck in for half a day :-)
It would almost be good to ... have a bigger campus.
Tough luck on that though.
I have this unsubstantiated fear though that having the conference more orderly may actually make things worse.
I liked how some people brought their kids, that was great.
(I found the anti-cash vibe in Brussels outside the conference pretty fucking annoying though. Metro machines that take coins but have no cash slot? What is this bullshit?)
It’s not just the FOSS scene but there is an increasing crowd (mostly on the internet) of “everything is political”. Honestly I’m not sure what will happen in the coming years but personally I try to take a step back and detach myself from all these things. Some (even here on HN) call this as privilege but then so be it I value my mental health more.
I don't go to the talks because they are recorded, it's more about meeting friends around a coffee or a beer.
Maybe in the future, we will have more tables for hacking like at CCC...
Are they construction a new building for that? Or making used of the unused floorspace in the U building?
Maybe I was in the wrong rooms, but the quality of the talks were really low.. Most of them were advertising one kind of service or another.
10y ago we had the issue with one of the talks in the IOT devroom which was very "corporate" with one presentation turning into the promotion of a proprietary product.
At the closing, they requested that you send them any feedback about any part of the event
Sure, there was some mention of Brazil in some talks. And yes, a couple of China specific speakers etc, but in my view this is almost cancelled by the inclusion of topics about taiwan. Similarly the China focused talks mention "specific risks" stemming ostensibly from a differing system of governance.
Almost as if corporate sponsorships induce self censorships which limit true organizing effort.
We're in 2026, hardware is made in dark factories in shenzhen in fully automated assembly lines by the million of units. Software is written using LLMs hosted in gigantic datacenters. Millions of people are now writing their own software with vibe coding platforms from their phones
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 !
These takes are completely out of touch with reality, no wonder that nobody younger than 40 was attending the conference. The next generation is doing something else and rightly so.
The more general goal will remain to protect all individual freedoms from all tyrannical governments, not to depend on them. It will remain to use better information technology to enhance the functioning of all governments and to create healthy competition in all markets to protect consumer choice. American OSS has not forgotten this one bit. Our country is just having a moment, and it won't help if EU OSS participation writes us off as casualties while EU OSS focuses on "uniquely European" solutions.
Curiously backwards. That's one way of reframing a disadvantage as an advantage. The train connection seems to be 3h15m to 3h30m from Neuss train station to FOSDEM. A single connection for the long-distance train in Cologne, the rest is local public transport within Brussels.
(The OP may been /s without me realizing.)
But outside of these hours the car is simply much more convenient. I lived in Brussels for 42 years and did everything that wasn't walking distance by car (very mostly in the pre- Uber days). You simply know where the parking spots are and it's too convenient to have your own car when you come out of the restaurant, without to have to worry about the last bus / last tram / getting mugged.
TFA's author went up early in the morning: he's dodging traffic jams.
For example FOSDEM if I'm concerned there'd be no spot? I'd park on the other side of the Bois de la Cambre and then walk to the campus.
Bicycling? It's nice when you don't have a nice bicycle. Otherwise it's gone in 60 seconds. I also don't see many people bicycling when the weather is bad and, well, let's get real: it rains a huge freaking lot in Brussels.
P.S: FOSDEM is happening in the Ixelles district, adjacent to the Uccle district (the Bois de la Cambre is on both districts). These are the two poshest, classiest, most expensive districts of Brussels with very few high-rises and very few soviet-style buildings with lots of apartments (these exists but in other districts). It's as if FOSDEM was taking place in Beverly Hills. In these posh areas there are parking spots.
As they say, there's no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing. The weather in the Netherlands is not very different and it doesn't stop them.
Also the public transportation is by far the best of the country, but that doesn't say a lot.
Unless you happen to live alone and interact with no one, basically every single interaction is undergirded by policies determined by humans. Politics. A computer/phone being built that is purchasable for legal tender, charged by electricity being fed into our homes, where we can send packets in the air, underground and across the world, doesn't happen by magic. It's literally the result of politics.
"Detaching oneself" really just means "not paying attention to politics". And it's a free world to do so, especially for mental health reasons. It's definitely not healthy to be tapped into news/current events all the time and I have to take breaks myself. But for some people, they can't really detach when their literal existence is deemed "political". This is what people refer to when they say it's privileged to detach.
Side Note: criticism of "detaching" is not referring to things like detaching for mental health. Internet trolls aside, that's a strawman argument. What it's referring to is the kind of people who say "oh, I'm just apolitical" or "tech is apolitical, it's just code", when really the status quo is in their favor and they have zero need to ever think about political issues. They would certainly not be "apolitical" if they were being banned from entering public bathrooms or being banned from contributing to F/OSS projects on the basis of their skin color!
On the internet (1hr per day, courtesy of the local library), I was just the words on the screen. Nobody knew I was poor. Nobody knew I was weird-looking. Nobody knew anything except whether my code worked and whether my arguments made sense. That pseudonymity wasn't a limitation of the technology... it was the most liberating feature I'd ever experienced.
When people say "everything is political" and "detaching is privilege", I feel like they're describing a completely different internet to the one that saved me. The privilege wasn't being able to ignore politics- the privilege was finally finding a space where the hierarchies that had crushed me in the physical world simply didn't exist.
Bringing identity and real-world political causes into these spaces doesn't make them more inclusive- it recreates the very social hierarchies we'd escaped. When you insist I must care about your cause, acknowledge your identity, or pledge allegiance to your political framework just to contribute code or discuss technology, you're making the space less meritocratic, not more.
The early internet let us be judged solely on the merit of our ideas. That was radical. That was revolutionary. For some of us, that was the only place we'd ever experienced actual equality of opportunity.
When you demand these spaces become "politically aware", what I hear is: "your refuge wasn't good enough, and now you need to care about my problems too." But this was the one place where I didn't have to perform social status, where I didn't have to prove I belonged based on anything other than what I knew and what I could build.
I'm not saying the world's problems don't matter. I'm saying there used to be spaces where we could focus on intellectual puzzles and technical problems without importing every societal conflict. And frankly, for those of us who were outcasts in the physical world, losing that feels like losing the only place we ever truly belonged.
To extend your world picture just one more step - for those people whose "existance is political", a F/OSS world that does not concern itself with irrelevant politics provides that very haven where only the merit of ideas is considered.
Political and radical as it pertains to software, not whatever the grievance of the day to virtue signal over is.
FOSS projects are tired of the incessant US-centric, champagne socialist politicking destroying their communities. Thankfully peak nonsense is behind us. You no longer have power.
>But for some people, they can't really detach when their literal existence is deemed "political".
Everyone's existence is "political." It's a privileged position to think your existence is "political" while others are not.
This strategy works poorly to avoid conflict and friction (life), since one just shifts conflict to reappear elsewhere. Hence the often claimed need to self-isolate "for mental health" to avoid getting in contact with... positions such as one's own, and half-suppressed anger at all those that just don't see what is RIGHT.
Hint: It doesn't work.
I happen to be one of these FOSS guys though and as you do, I think it's better to stay off to keep my mental health; else it makes me feel powerless. How sad: 20 years ago I thought the fight was possible.
Judging from HN we are pass that already. Absolute Peak of it was 2014 - 2017. But I guess this is a new trend especially in EUR.
There does however seem to be a "free/libre" vs open source rift along the Atlantic ridge, and it is being wedged apart by the US government flirting with a return to isolationism mixed with bullying and self-enforced credible threat geopolitics.
It is really counter-productive for Europeans to think American OSS people are monolithic with US tech giants and the US federal government. Nonetheless, pluralism is good, and innovation will win, so I suppose it's just another hairpin in the game.
Now I find myself judged when using Nix, genAI, Blockchain, Omarchy (and by extension even Framework), Podcasting 2.0 related things, Centos Stream... It doesn't end. So many people that divide the world in good/bad, them/us. I'm tuning out tbh.
(as an aside, I wish I could have some indication of how polarized the voting here on HN is ;))
The difference is that social media is amplifying things a lot more and there is a culture of destroying people in public (made easier by social media amplification).
It’s really the same issue as outside FOSS, social media creates stronger bubbles, more extremes, more grifters, and more amplification of crap.
But let’s refocus on FOSDEM and the mission of libre software to allow us to exist without “corporate oversight” or to just build, with tools made by other humans.
I don't follow. Are you implying that by using Ruby on Rails or Omarchy one is fasho aligned ? Or that people that use Swift somehow support sex offenders ?
And not to compare badness, but DHH is ranting publicly on his blog about the projected % of white people in Norway in 2096 and quoting white supremacists in his lamentation about the UK not being more white. Blaming the increasingly totalitarian actions the UK has been taking on immigrants and not the literal lawmakers setting those policies is certainly an opinion to hold. It's a whole lot more in your face.
I do agree about Omarchy linux though- that's still very closely associated with DHH and I'm not touching that with a 39.5ft pole, let alone before getting into technical issues. I was honestly pretty disappointed to see the typical dev personalities online cover Omarchy linux despite the crap DHH has been spewing on his blog.
Was that your intention?
Generally people afraid of politics are using the term as an empty space for some form of specific politics they want to run away from. In which case, why not just say what you mean.
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.
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'
Hmmm, I was there and this is definitely not true.
Just like how novel reading, newspapers, music, rock music, the internet, computer games all made everyone super dumb and the world ended.
I am definitely sure that this time you are right and the world will actually end this time, everyones going to end up way dumber than you, or if they dont, you will still pretend it happened and be smug about it on the internet.
Invite the open source developpers behind popular OSS AI frameworks such as opencode, etc.
Invite talkers from large companies that produce open source software and models such as Mistral.AI
Invite talkers from companies that run OSS LLMs at scale such as groq
Invite the people who build drones in Ukraine, (probably the most succesful open hardware story to date). Have drone building workshops / drone piloting stands
Sounds brilliant. 2024 LLMs were great, and hosted in gigantic datacenters. South Park did an episode on ChatGPT in 2023 to assist with the timescales.
If we can run Free LLMs on a desktop PC that's competitive with 2024 a massive win.
Unless of course you believe that AI will continue to increase exponentially, in which case we're heading for such a different world in 10-15 years that it's meaningless to worry about it and you might as well have fun before the AI decides to kill us all
I only caught half a dozen talks, and two of them talked about this exact point.
This is also why the EU has a hard time. America prefers the capitalist model. EU is trying to find ways encourage individual developers each with their own interests to contribute to shared European goals (which the devs also share but might not find interesting), and they're trying to do this without directly saying "you there, go and do this", and that's harder than herding cats.
For instance they do it through NLNET funding. Devs can propose projects and the ones the EU wants to fund will receive funding. It's a roundabout way to do things. Let's see if it pays off.
You literally just lumped it all together, exactly the fallacy I'm voicing my concern about.
> foreign-owned proprietary
OSS is global. "Foreign owned" is relative. If Americans reject "European" open source, it would make zero sense.
> the US model
What even is "the US model?" The things that are being described as "American" or "European" here are not inherently national.
I would say it is around since the creation of the networked computer.
Remember the debate on about centralized mainframes vs home computers?
Why would one at this very moment look with suspicion at a FOSS contributor for the sole reason (s)he's American?
At this time, we are still openly committed to the 2nd amendment in defense of the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 6th and so on. I am encouraging others to participate in open-carry demonstrations to make it clear to the authoritarians that they will not get the intimidating optics of an unopposed crackdown against a helpless crowd that they want. Personally, I grew up shooting things, so handling bootlickers will be natural if it comes to it.
Technically enabled solutions to better communicate, organize, and represent the will of the people would help a lot. Bomb-shelter thinking will not help much. If the US devolves into a Russian style authoritarian state, one where I will no longer be welcomed off the plane, the EU will have more to worry about than Windows. My ideas on the technically enabled side are complex but sound, so I encourage any interested in doing full stack Rust to get a hold of me by clicking links. I'll be finishing up some shader programming and feedback rendering today as the next piece of my strategy.
The US can, right now, crash pretty much the entire western industry/economy by disconnecting their digital services.
The US already threatens the western world with that power. They already use it.
Of course the EU has to care about that. The reason they accepted the dependency was that for a long time they were looking up to the US, and couldn't imagine that the US could become an enemy in the space of a few weeks.
Now the US has proven that they could realistically go from this state that the western world trusted to declaring war to allies in a matter of weeks. Of course everybody is scared.
Has it ever worked? ICE is killing Americans, and you can't point your gun to them, its not lawful.
If Trump tells ICE to seize all weapons in the US, or otherwise shoot people, you can't point your gun to them, its not lawful.
Outside the constitution, outside their jurisdiction, and not lawful.
Popular sovereignty always works. One way or another.
The most wrong opinion in the debate is to claim that we will be punished for open carry demonstrations. Only an abuse victim excuses the attacker, and allowing the attacker to do what they want is just catch 22.
Being flexible with DB is expensive. Getting somewhere at all is generally cheap. Getting somewhere at a reasonable time is usually ok~ish priced. But being able to just take any train? €€€
https://belgiantrain.be for finding trains and tickets to/from the nearest station, Etterbeek (or use another station if you want to take the tram, where you just swipe a bank card). The ticket is valid for any train going to your destination. For those <26yo, the price is discounted. Welkenraedt is an intercity station with free parking that goes directly to Brussels, in case that happens to be near to someone reading this
Same with the Netherlands. Sadly no intercity stations have free parking but Nuth is on the path north and the highway exit basically ends in its parking lot. After a few stops you can switch to an intercity to Amsterdam
Maastricht Noord has a much bigger free parking, in case this part of the Netherlands is how you want to start your journey up north.
- Formal verification in Rocq, an exhaustive testing.
And they are all quickly booked as well, if you are not there when the registration process open, you can't have a table.
If everything is political then nothing is.
>This is an indicator of privilege because only people who benefit from the status quo seek to prevent it from changing.
You have this backwards: the ability to politick all day is the largest indicator of priviledge. Both sides believe the "status quo" is empowering their political enemies.
I just wanted to tell you that.
They mostly think their opinion is the right one, and others are just flailing around not understanding the real "objective" "truth". But they never spent more than a minute thinking things through and re-evaluating their biases and "objective reality"...
They then spend quite some time ranting about things that are obviously political, but on the same breath say they are proud not to vote...
I am a hacker, a baker of breads, a father, a debater, a thinker. Period. Not libertarian or whatever. My ideas sometimes are more like a democrat, sometimes more republican. I often like Bernie Sanders, and Schwarzenegger would be a nice, good, kind republican president imho. I don't like being seen as a part of any of these groups. I enjoy discussing reasons for "the 2 party" (but not really 2 party-) system much more than discussing which is morally superior.
This, to me, is a valid stance. For some it is the way to stay sane.
To deny another human being the rights you enjoy is imho the same as denying yourself those rights (because I, as a 3rd person, see both people as equal, and otherwise there is a paradox). This is the basis of our justice system, we "put people away" in cages, and in some places even kill them, because they believed their right to swing their fist does not end at someone else's nose. But presumably they would not enjoy a fist to the nose themselves.
But does it mean "100% open borders"? (notice the 100%) Should those rights pertain to (higher) animals? (notice the "higher")
There is nuance to explore, there are many ways to be a humanist. I.e., dumping mosquito nets in a mosquito rich area may be seen as helping, but not to local mosquito net makers (and thus you are not helping anyone in the long term, because the mosquito net makers are all bankrupt).
There is always nuance. And there are always exceptions, and your statements generalize exceptions to much larger groups, demanding action on a scale that is unwarranted, imho. Both sides are responding vividly to exceptions, to lack of nuance, to 160 character statements in all caps.
I just like some terms more than others, they work for me, I think they make the world a better, more interesting place. Where is the politics in that?
Nowadays you have AI generated books which are very surpar even if they look an impressive exercise of LLM's.
Expensive bestsellers had the worst quality/price ratio.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Varlink is based on much more conventional UNIX technology than Dbus, which is decades old: You connect to a named UNIX socket through its socket file in the filesystem (man page: unix(7)).
This is an old mechanism and it is known to work well. It does not require a broker service, it works right at system startup, and it does not require a working user database for permission checks (which would be a circular dependency for systemd in some configurations). If at all, I am surprised that systemd didn't use that earlier.
The main thing that Varlink standardizes on top of that is a JSON-based serialization format for a series of request/response pairs. But that seems like a lightweight addition.
It also does not require kernel support to work, the kernel support is already there. He mentioned in the talk that he'd like to be able to "tag" UNIX sockets that speak varlink as such, with kernel support. But that is not a prerequisite to use this at all. The service discovery -- and he said that in the talk as well -- is simply done by listing socket files in the file system, and by having a convention for where they are created.
Though I have a pretty good idea of where a Varlink broker would turn up and which init system it would be tied to.
You can run "netstat --listening --unix" to list the UNIX domain servers on your system, to get an impression.
If anything, that talk was a tad low effort, with even dismissive answers — "Yes" and "No?" as full answers to audience questions, with no follow up?! Still very informative though!
It's a very "I've made a cool thing. This is what I think is cool about it" type of talk. Which I don't think is uncommon for FOSDEM. Maybe a bit uncommon for a higher profile figure like Lennart.
Like US families torn between 2 sides of their politics, they can't even have normal dinners together anymore. They can't communicate without judging, it's an illness, they've been weaponized against each other.
"our hacker-minded spaces"
Spaces full of people.
"once clean, apolitical world-of-mind"
This only ever existed for select few people.
It's actually not. It's very easy to get along with people, even those from whom we have vastly differing moral axioms, if we only try. Sadly these days many people are disinterested in trying, believing (wrongly) that they will make the world a better place if they sow more division.
The virtual world(s) felt like equality of opportunity because everything was a blank canvas, or some canvas that barely had any fingerprints on it. For a lot of people the internet currently consists out of WhatsApp, Facebook, and Google News. So tell me, what is truly radical, what is revolutionary anymore?
That pseudonymity you're describing still exists in many spaces to this day. I have no idea what many (most?) of the contributors on F/OSS projects look like, or anything about them unless they voluntarily divulged it. You don't have to "pledge allegiance to political frameworks", not for any F/OSS project that I'm aware of.
What people do have to do more now is treat other people with respect, which the old internet very much did not do well. There are many people who can code, so projects actually don't have to keep around people who can't conduct themselves nicely.
"When you demand these spaces become ..."
"Demand" is a strawman argument. What changed overall is that people bring themselves into these spaces, not just a pseudonymous username. That comes with different expectations for conduct. Do you miss the flamewars of the past?
"where I didn't have to prove I belonged"
What F/OSS projects do you have to do this for? Basically every project I've contributed to had nothing like that.
"... there used to be spaces where we could focus on intellectual puzzles and technical problems without importing every societal conflict"
While I can empathize with this, I'm not sure if I entirely agree with this recollection of the internet. People could still be cruel to anyone who happened to reveal anything about themselves, as humans tend to do, that was "atypical", shall we say. I don't see why you still can't focus on technical problems, because unless you're a moderator, nobody is forcing you to comment on anything except technical discussions.
Read this and tell me free software is not politics
The beauty of libraries and cheap computers wasn't just that they existed through political decisions, it's that I could use them without performing any particular political identity beyond their core function. If libraries close or computing becomes subscription-only, I'll fight that because access matters. But I can defend access whilst wanting spaces where the primary focus remains the technical work. The right to read is worth defending. So is the right to just read, without every reading group becoming a political caucus.
Looking at the track layout in OSM, I'm very surprised that the regional train from Roermond literally cannot reach the platform and passes within like 1-2 meters of the stop. That means that 99% of destinations in NL require you to first take a train into Maastricht and then backtrack (pay double) for the path north. Not sure I'd recommend that over Bunde (3km further, also free parking) unless your destination is one of the tiny towns towards Heerlen. Even if you want to hop onto the tri-country train (BE-NL-DE), which stops at the previous and next stations (Maastricht and Meerssen) and could simply stop at this platform, Maastricht Noord is useless to you O.o who is that rich person living somewhere along this track who funded that incapacitated station such that they can be its only user? xD
Edit: you are correct, btw! https://hn.algolia.com/?query="nuth"&type=comment
Everybody understands OSS/free software is global (though copyright/left is still subject to export controls and other laws.) No question about that. And I was specifically talking about proprietary software there, you even copied that in your reply...Proprietary software is bad; foreign-owned is even worse, like the EU has learned recently when Microsoft cuts your email short, for example.
The "US model" is obviously big monopolies or duopolies run unchecked, allowed to buy, prevent and starve competition, then seeking regulatory capture to secure a moat. That is what people know, for better or for worse. No laymen knows the FSF, or what that guy in Arkansas in the xkcd is doing for the digital infrastructure.
I think the main challenge for Europe will be to manage those public investments in an effective way for people's benefit. As far as I know, there are few precedents, and maybe nothing of that scale. China pulls off of open/free software significantly, mostly to avoid US proprietary software, but to my knowledge they don't give much/anything back. So it seems challenging, but I'm also excited for how/if they pull it off.
By the way, I donate to both US and EU free software and digital rights organizations. It was not my intention to nurture your conception of a divide, if that is what you took from my comment.
> The more general goal will remain to protect all individual freedoms from all tyrannical governments, not to depend on them.
This is more of an American pov and will probably be a disconnect for Europeans. Their governments don't screw them as much, so they probably don't see them as tyrannical. Those governments investing in proprietary software to move away from other proprietary software would be a mistake; so government investment into free/open source should be seen as a win, not something to shy away from in the name of individual freedom.
Dude, "American OSS and American corporations" is simple conjunction, a union, treating two things as one so that you can make a single predicate statement about them. If you mean to make separate statements about the two things, maybe don't group them into the same sentence phrase?
I asked you not to group these things together. If this provokes you to begin regurgitating "free/libre" ideology all over again, you obviously think that being asked to separate American OSS and American corporations is somehow incompatible with OSS or "free/libre". American OSS marched in front of Microsoft to demand refunds. Get it right.
But, you're only a few minutes from Maastricht, so that shouldn't add too much time, and you get to get a good seat, since it's the start of the IC journey ;)
No training data -> not "open source"
No code for the training -> not "open source"
Like this AI track? What more do you want?
That said, I am not attracted to the VC culture but their process delivers the value which creates successful companies.
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.
He held a similar talk at All Systems Go I think (I missed the talk here at FOSDEM).
> It's a very "I've made a cool thing. This is what I think is cool about it" type of talk.
Varlink isn't something he just made up, he mearly "adopted it" (started making use of it). It existed before, but I don't know anything that really made use of it before.
The official-looking website at https://varlink.org doesn't give any information about who the authors are, as far as I can tell, but the screenshots show the username "kay". There's a git repo for libvarlink [1] where the first commits (from 2017) are by Kay Sievers, who is one of the systemd developers.
An announcement post [2] from later in 2017, by Harald Hoyer, says that the varlink protocol was created by Kay Sievers and Lars Karlitski in "our team", presumably referring to the systemd team.
So the systemd developers "adopted" their own thing from themselves?
[1]: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commits/main/?author=kays...
[2]: https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Asystemd%2Fsystemd+varlink...
If Lennart Poettering "adopted" varlink, he seems to have done so from members of his own team ("our team") who created varlink and who are also fellow co-creators of systemd.
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.
This type of self destructive behavior may seem worthwhile in the moment, but in the long run it doesn't bring any benefits, because you have to fight the people you're declaring war against and if the list of enemies is long enough, you're almost certainly guaranteed to lose against one of them.
Opinions evolve through exposure to different viewpoints, not through isolation from them. The homophobes and racists of the 80s who changed their minds didn't do so because they were shut out of communities - they changed because they were forced to actually interact with the people they'd made assumptions about. That contact broke down the assumptions.
When you exclude someone pre-emptively because you've decided what they must believe, you've eliminated the possibility of that evolution happening. You've also replicated the exact mechanism that made 80s bigotry so pernicious: denying participation based on identity or assumed characteristics rather than actual conduct.
Everyone thinks they're right. The racists thought they were right. The homophobes thought they were right. You think you're right. I think I'm right. That's why behaviour-based boundaries matter more than belief-based ones. Judge people on what they actually do in the space, not what you assume they think.
If your moral framework requires everyone to already agree with you before they're allowed to participate, you're not building a community - you're enforcing an orthodoxy. And orthodoxies don't evolve, they just calcify.
Is this line of thinking going to make things better for future generations or is it not?
How important is it to work on defining this boundary, compared to working towards a less polarized society?
Yes, you will be able to find examples that confirm your statement, but they are an exceedingly small minority, probably despised (almost) as much by their "own group" (as far as people actually feel part of a group) as they are by you.
I believe it is the (incentives of) the (social)media and the bots that have made you believe otherwise, over time and in small steps.
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.
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.