Events/FOSDEM Leftovers
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LWN ☛ The selfish contributor revisited
Open source is often described as a "gift economy"—an ecosystem where contributors are motivated by a desire to make the world a better place. That is, sometimes, true. However, James Bottomley used his main track slot at FOSDEM 2025, on February 1, to make the case that it is better to bank on the selfish motivations of individuals to drive community success than to rely on their altruism.
His talk was titled "The Selfish Contributor Revisited". It was something of a follow-up to "The Selfish Contributor Explained", a presentation that Bottomley gave at FOSDEM in the "Community and Ethics" devroom in 2020. That talk focused on the selfish interests of corporations that contribute to open source. This time, he came to discuss the motivations of individual contributors instead.
Bottomley began with the disclaimer that, while Microsoft is his employer, the opinions expressed in his talk were his and his only. That said, his day job of managing engineers provides a certain insight into their motivations and how to persuade them to do what the corporation considers ""productive work"". Productive work, in this case, being defined by what VPs and CEOs want done.
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Sam Thursfield: Status update, 19/02/2025
Happily I have survived the intense storms of January 2025, and the biting February temperatures, and I’m here with another status update post.
I made it to FOSDEM 2025, which was its usual self, a unique gathering of people who care about making ethical software, sharing cool technology, and eating delicious waffles. In the end, Jack Dorsey didn’t do a talk (see last month’s post for why I don’t think he’d have fit in very well); the FOSDEM organisers did meet the main protest organiser and had what seems to be a useful discussion on what happened.
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Jan Piet Mens ☛ Netbox, DNS, and a pinch of OctoDNS
One of the talks from the DNS Devroom at FOSDEM 2025 I watched online was by Peter Eckel about Netbox. I hoped I would learn a bit about the tool, which I didn’t, but I did learn about the history of his netbox-plugin-dns. I won’t repeat all that here, as he can tell you himself: the video and his presentation are online.
It then transpired (as in time, not as in odour) that I dug into Netbox a bit, and ten days later I think about Netbox and DNS.
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LWN ☛ Milliwatt machine learning with emlearn
While large language models and the expensive hardware they require are all the rage now, other areas of artificial intelligence work within much more constrained hardware environments. At FOSDEM 2025, Jon Nordby presented his open-source machine-learning inference engine for microcontrollers, named emlearn. The project also boasts bindings for MicroPython, thus making machine-learning applications even more accessible.
Nordby's talk, "Milliwatt sized Machine Learning on microcontrollers with emlearn", was part of the Low-level AI Engineering and Hacking developer room (devroom) at FOSDEM. Nordby is the CTO and co-founder of Soundsensing, a Norwegian company that monitors ventilation systems and other technical infrastructure for its clients. The company uses machine learning to detect anomalies in data from sound and vibration sensors, thereby providing early warning of potential failures.