This week in #FDroid (TWIF) is live on a Monday:

* post #FOSDEM reactions
* #FMD on the edge
* #Fossify Calendar fix
* #HarmonyMusic stopped development
* #LocalSend share via #CVE
* #Anki has a new owner
+ one new app
& 209 updates
- one archived

We're not late but early: https://f-droid.org/2026/02/09/twif.html

Someone at #FOSDEM asked us to put some promotional materials on our website that they could print for an event. There is now a section for that on the Branding page with our first poster:

https://joinmastodon.org/branding

Always a delight to be sent random circuit boards in the post 😄
Not sure I'll have enough time before #FOSDEM to set up a full #Meshtastic node, but I'll give it a go!

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A Femtofox Pro board. A pocket sized circuit board with lots of wires.

Containers, cloud, blockchain, AI – it's all the same old BS, says veteran Red Hatter

https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/08/waves_of_tech_bs/

After decades in the trenches, this engineer is done with hype cycles

<- by me on @theregister

#FOSDEM #CENTOSCONNECT

Did anyone take photos of the posters at #fosdem ?

I wanted to but I forgot, so if you have any please could you share?

This can only happens at #FOSDEM unexpected meeting with #OSHW @braillerap and |Lupin| an #ocaml engineer joing @vates in may

Good morning Fedi friends,

I just finished selecting and color grading the photos I took this past weekend at #FOSDEM in the Social Web devroom.

There are some really nice ones of speakers and I look forward to sharing a few here...

But first: I wanna ask the speakers permission because... CONSENT.

So stay tuned 😊

Wishing everyone a great day!

Did you get a #Luanti sticker from us at #FOSDEM? Post a picture of how you're using it under the #Luanti hashtag!

Bonus marks for including a pet

Finally had a few minutes to review the video of the session I moderated at #FOSDEM -- have to say that I'm deeply impressed by their process.

Video report form is perfect -- easy to report any problems (no problem with my video except that it starts a bit early -- it would not be terrible if it had been released as-is, but will be nicer for viewers if it's trimmed).

Major kudos to the @fosdem organizers and video team in particular. It's a great resource for all the folks who can't attend FOSDEM or can attend but can't be everywhere at once.

Someone at #FOSDEM reached out to me about a organization that takes care of the logistics of hosting conferences? I.e. venue, ticketing and catering. And it was free for open source projects.

I remember Munich, London and Paris(?) as possible locations?

Sounded great. Forgot their name. Does anyone know?

Boost appreciated!

📺 My talk in the #HPC track at #FOSDEM, “Package management in the hands of users: dream and reality” 👇
https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/QKNMJN-package-management-in-the-hands-of-users/

#Guix

#FOSDEM: Wo das "Herz der freien Welt" schlägt - Golem.de
#FOSDEM26 #opensource #linux
https://www.golem.de/news/fosdem-2026-wo-das-herz-der-freien-welt-schlaegt-2602-204902.html

https://fosdem.org/2026/news/2025-11-16-accepted-stands/# #FOSDEM : I will be back at #FOSDEM2026 , ask me about #XcpNg
or to my new colleagues from @vates , we will hang around the #Xen community

#XMPP @ #FOSDEM 2026

Thanks to all organisers, supporters and visitors for the great experience at our XMPP #Realtime Lounge and at the venue overall!

We end the day with this lovely creation from Angela (piscimisty) <3

#jabber #chat #opensource #messaging #federation #Brussels #Belgium #europe

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A self-made, hand-drawn (aquarell) folded letter with a mermaid holding the XMPP logo out of the water. Its adressed to XMPP Devs of the XSF.

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Unfolding the letter shows a hand-drawn (aquarell) mermaid and the logos of multiple XMPP chat apps such as Conversations, Dino and Snikket. The text admires the work of the quote "best messaging protocol" and sends regards from Angela to Ge0rG, a long-term comunity and the disroot.org admins.

The video of my #FOSDEM 2026 talk on integrating the Fourth Research Edition Unix tape into the GitHub Unix history repository is now available online: https://ftp.belnet.be/mirror/FOSDEM/video/2026/h2215/DCDAUY-the_v4_tape_in_the_unix_history_repo.av1.webm

Video reviews are going on in parallel! @fosdembsd #fosdem

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Thank you for sending your review

If you are watching the videos of #FOSDEM or you were lucky enough to be onsite, please leave feedback for the speakers on their talk pages. This is super helpful!

#foss #Feedback #fosdem

Last weekend, I attended FOSDEM, the largest Open Source conference in Europe. The last time that I attended was exactly a decade ago, and I had forgotten what it was really about.

But this became instantly obvious when (nearly) the first slide during the Opening Remarks shouted loudly: "Open Source has always been political". The emotional introduction instantly brought home what Open Source is really about: Activism to break the chains of "big tech". Although big tech wasn't so big when they started the conference over 25 years ago, it is now more required than ever.

As I remembered that it can be really hard to get into the rooms where talks are held — FOSDEM can be really busy — I had made a plan to divide my two days up in roughly four blocks to follow talks in the same room. I also made sure I showed up a talk (or two before), to have a better chance of having a seat in the talks I wanted to attend.

I spend most of Saturday following talks in the Geospatial and Legal & Policy tracks. Although Geospatial, mostly through OpenStreetMap, is my fun open data involvement, the Legal & Policy tracks were good to see.

In From Policy To Practice; Open Source in The Dutch Government, I learned from Gina Plat how the (old and new) Dutch governments are now pushing ahead with Open Source. With the more volatile situation in the USA, where constant threats of tariffs and other economic measure, they seem to now have understood, that it is vital to build up their own stacks. Although there have been policy and plans before, there is now also funding available to reduce the liability on US big tech stacks and software. It's not perfect, but there is certainly progress.

After more geo fun in the afternoon, I attended Neil Brown's "Online Safety" laws: reflections for FOSS projects (video). Although I am familiar with the topic, and have written about this before to my MP, it was good to see Neil explain how this affects open source projects specifically. The main take-away here was that although you can follow the law(s) to the latter, it is likely going to be more important to check what risk there actually is for users, and for the project itself, when the regulator comes knocking on the door.

Talks on regulations, mostly in the EU form, is what my piqued my interest next, and I spend most of my Sunday morning in the Open Source & EU Policy track.

I arrived early enough to catch the Digital Omnibus: is the EU's tech simplification a Risk or Opportunity from Open Source. How EU Policy is created is often complicated. This talk critically explored the challenges that policymakers have to make the regulatory burden on EU projects and products lighter. At the same time, regulation should not get in the way of innovation and competitiveness, but also not be so light that the general protections towards user privacy and control are watered down too far.

I was mainly aiming to see "The Fediverse and the EU's Digital Service Act". Jordan Maris moderated this panel discussion, with Sandra Barthel, Alexandra Geese (MEP for the Greens/EFA group), and Felix Hlatky (executive director of Mastodon GmbH), answering questions. The whole discussion was interesting, my main takeaways were the explanations by Alexandra on the DSA.

The provisions under the DSA are frequently derided by the American tech bros and their government allies as "censorship". Alexandra eloquently argued that the provisions in the DSA are explicitly meant to do the opposite. The DSA requires large operators to explain what their algorithms do, and how they work, to (try to) prevent the doom-spiral towards hate speech and othering. These algorithms have been designed to keep users engaged so that they see more advertisements. And the best way to keep users on your platform is to make them feel angry about something — usually vulnerable groups of people.

While listening to the panel, the though occurred to me that the approach by the EU is very different from the approach across the ocean. Where there the mentality is "work fast and break things", with no regulation to protect people's rights succinctly, in the EU the approach is strong regulation to prevent harm.

But that does require that the provisions are properly enforced, with enough resources, and sometimes with enough political will to not kowtow to the Americans with their tantrums. I suspect that we will see more of these tantrums in a short while, now that the EU is more keen to show its fangs as well.

On this side of the pond all is not well either. The UK's Online Safety Act is already a sad state of affairs, especially now there are rumours that they are considering banning age gating VPNs as well. But Age Verification as a measure to "save the children" is popping up in many jurisdictions. Age Verification and Assurance are antithetical to the open nature of the Web and free expression, and will not work regardless.

Where the focus now mainly is on websites themselves, there is a distinct possibility that regulators will want to enforce age on service level (app stores/package managers), on browser level, and on operating system level. These all conflict with open source variants (F-droid, Firefox, Linux), unless you withdraw the freedom that users have on what to run on their devices.

Nobody has any idea how a wide roll-out of Age Verification and Assurance will work out. It's like going straight to a release without beta testing. Preventing the broadening of Age Verification and Assurance is where the next fight for the open web and freedom of expression now must be.

We don't have the luxury of sitting on our hands, and as the opening slides of FOSDEM indicated that "Open Source has always been political", the closing remarks were equally pungent: We can't afford to not be politically active, and that's why we must engage with politicians. FOSDEM has fanned the flames in me for doing more again. Stay tuned!

And remember: "If we lose our democracies, Open Source is irrelevant and goes away".

If you have any feedback about #fosdem please do send it our way using feedback@fosdem.org
The more feedback we have (can def be positive as well obv) the better we can make the next edition!
Please

Don't miss us during this great @fosdem ! #FOSDEM

Building H, level 1: come get our shiny stickers! 🤩

Rust Coreutils 0.6 erreicht 96 Prozent GNU-Kompatibilität

Die Rust-Neuimplementierung klassischer Unix-Tools erreicht in Version 0.6 eine GNU-Kompatibilität von 96 Prozent – und reduziert Unsafe-Code.

https://www.heise.de/news/Rust-Coreutils-0-6-erreicht-96-Prozent-GNU-Kompatibilitaet-11163178.html?wt_mc=sm.red.ho.mastodon.mastodon.md_beitraege.md_beitraege&utm_source=mastodon

#Fedora #FOSDEM #IT #Linux #OpenSource #Rust #news

https://xcp-ng.org/forum/topic/11778/fosdem-2026# #FOSDEM if you visited #XcpNg stand and want to share any feedback please do in project forum, we have also a #matrix room to join, keep connected until #fosdem2027 !

@bogo recording of the closing talk and https://dashboard.fosdem.org

#FOSDEM

Let me know if you see me at #FOSDEM this year!

My favorite part of the job has always been people, and it’s even more true at FOSDEM.

In those “backstage” pictures you can see what I love. People having fun, people taking care of each other, people helping each other.

FOSDEM is where I can thank those who make the software I use. It’s where we can meet. It’s where I can give back.

Like every year I’m exhausted and looking forward to the next one. Thanks all for being part of this.

#fosdem #matrix #openSource

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A room full with 100 people smiling and all wearing a Matrix cap.

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A portrait of Matthew attaching a mic to Neil as he prepares for his talk in the devroom.

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Two people having fun at the booth after one of them cracked a joke.

Are they any stats published for #FOSDEM yet here at the fediverse?

Anyone needs a European Sleeper night train ticket from Brussels to Berlin for tomorrow Wednesday the 4th of February? I cannot take the train, I can't cancel the ticket but it's transferable.

#fosdem #teamnighttrain

My trip finally begins : Tonight, the 453 will bring me in a comfortable wagon-lits to Berlin, the first stop of my #FOSSRail trip from 🇧🇪 Brussels to 🇹🇭 Bangkok connecting the FOSDEM with the FOSSASIA by train.

I will spend the next two weeks on trains across 12 countries and 11.000 km on rails.

May the games begin ✊🏽.

#FOSSRail #FOSDEM #FOSSASIA #CrossBorderRail #TeamNightTrain

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A made bed in a wagon-lits compartment.

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Ceiling light in an old wagon-lits train.

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A Bombardier Traxx locomotive hauling a European Sleeper into Bruxelles-Midi.

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A night train arriving in Brussels. It consists of couchette and sleeper carriages.

Open Source, not Open Fries!

The food is mine!

#FOSDEM

#FOSDEM was absolutely WILD! 😻

🤯🤯🤯 Got a hand-made #XMPP developers post card with a personal mention!

🤯🤯 Got a "Thanks Ge0rG, keep up the good work!" while walking the food mile!

🤯 Met an IRC contact from 25 years ago, @olbohlen ("Apparently I'm the only operator of #OpenFire on #Solaris") and connected him to @guusdk who brought stickers and hugs!

🤯 Accidentally met an IRC contact from 20 years ago

🤯 Accidentally met an #FDroid member iRL

🤯 Met @sven (#fail0verflow) after 20 years

This year for #FOSDEM I gave a demonstration of wolfSSL cryptographic benchmarks on the wolfDemo board I designed.
Question for next year, should I demo it on an Amiga instead? 🙂

FOSDEM achievement = unlocked: yesterday I had the pleasure of meeting @bagder in person and grab some cool #curl stickers, yay! 🥳

I was really sad to miss his keynote (early train, sigh), but I'm planning to watch it online.

It was amazing to meet so many wonderful people at #FOSDEM... I've already started a countdown on my phone for the next edition. I can't wait.

And now: reviewing hundreds of photos I took with my phone and my Canon DSLR. The nostalgia is real 🥲

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a photo taken in the FOSDEM cafeteria showing Daniel Stenberg on the left (he's wearing a black wolfSSL t-shirt) and me on the right, wearing a "never mind the billionaires, here's the fediverse" t-shirt

@fell Yeah, the space is immensely tight for them, and some of them were even put in awkward locations like Ud2 hallway

I really wish the ULB had better buildings, but this is what #FOSDEM has to cook with.