FOSDEM is a long running free and open source community event that has moved online for its 21st year. This year's event will be a little different, but the silver lining is that you have the option to particpate at home, without any travel. This year's talks are all pre-recorded, and the speakers will be online to answer questions right after the intitial broadcast. If you want to be part of the live conversation, you'll have to join the conference in real time.

As usual, GNU Guix will be present at FOSDEM on February 6th and 7th. Due to the pandemic, this year’s edition takes place on-line. The downside is that we’ll miss beautiful Brussels, but on the up side hopefully people who cannot join physically will be able to attend this year, and the event’s carbon footprint will be much lower.

FOSDEM is online this year and we’re going to be there with a stand, volunteers, and GNOMEies of all varieties.

As every year, the FSFE will be present at FOSDEM, the biggest annual Free Software happening in Europe. In 2021, the FSFE is honored to co-organise the Legal and Policy Devroom at FOSDEM. We are excited and look forward to presenting you an interesting programme throughout the whole weekend.

While FOSDEM normally takes place every year in the Free University of Brussels, this year it will for the first time happen online. Also for the first time, the FSFE will co-organise the Legal and Policy Devroom on Saturday and Sunday at 14:00 CET.

It’s that time of year when open source community gathers for FOSDEM! FOSDEM is a free event for software developers to meet, share ideas, and collaborate. This year’s event will take place virtually, making it more accessible than ever. It will take place Feb 6 and 7. The Xen Project will be present in several ways, through both Unikraft and XCP-ng.

This month, a new app to guide you through FOSDEM’s busy timetable and a new version for our time planner app.

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The launch of Kongress 1.0 took place this month. It’s a conference timetable guide app and is launched just in time for FOSDEM, one of the world’s largest free software conferences happening online this weekend. You can use Kongress to browse the timetable and favourite all the important talks. You can adjust times to your local timezone to avoid confusion.

KDE will have a stand at FOSDEM with demos and welcoming faces, and as an online event people come visit from all over the world so do say hi on the stall Matrix channel #kde-stand:fosdem.org.

The most anticipated Open Source event for Europe is this weekend! Unfortunately this time online.

This week-end is #FOSDEM (6 & 7 February 2021) ! We will be glad to welcome you at our virtual booth, located in the operating systems area

Collabora Developers hold a series of presentations in the LibreOffice devroom at the famous 2021 FOSDEM!

FOSDEM, the Free Open-Source Developer Europeans' Meeting, remains one of the top open-source/Linux events in my book. Each February for this long tenured event thousands of open-source/Linux enthusiasts would gather in Brussels, Belgium for many technical and interesting talks on a wide range of subjects. Unfortunately due to the COVID-19 pandemic, FOSDEM can only take place virtually this year but that does allow for broader participation and you can enjoy all of the content online this weekend.

The virtual FOSDEM is taking place this weekend and remains a completely free event. Video streams of each talk are available and Q&A/chat can be done via Matrix. There is also a virtual conference floor for those wishing to see the open-source exhibits.

The seL4 micro-kernel that has been in development for over a decade saw the creation of the seL4 Foundation last year to further the project's goals. In 2020 the seL4 micro-kernel also added RISC-V as one of its primary CPU architectures.

The seL4 micro-kernel and its ecosystem continue on an upward trajectory even with everything going on in the world and competition from other open-source kernels. Today during the FOSDEM Online 2021 event there was a presentation by Professor Gernot Heiser on the seL4 advancements over the past year.

LibreSOC remains the very ambitious project of creating a fully open-source hybrid CPU/GPU SoC but with a very uphill battle still in front of them.

LibreSOC has been after designing a hybrid CPU/GPU that is 100% open-source. The project originally stated off as aiming to be a RISC-V Vulkan accelerator back when the project was known as Libre RISC-V. But they ultimately dropped RISC-V for aiming to be an OpenPOWER ISA based design over not needing NDAs and other organizational matters that turned them off to using RISC-V.

The original plans for this open-source accelerator have just focused on being able to deliver 1280 x 720 @ 25 FPS and around 5~6 GFLOPS.... Even back in 2018 when those goals were shared it was rather weak then and with each passing year just looks much weaker especially with their hopes of finding this open-source SoC to be used on consumer devices like Chromebook-type laptops and more.

My family got used to the fact that I am not available at beginning of February. Because of my FOSDEM trip. This year was not both not so different and different at same time.

Due to COVID-19 pandemic FOSDEM 2021 was online. So there was no reason for any trip other than to local shops to buy some Belgian beers. And I was not available to anyone during weekend.

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One of things FOSDEM is famous for is networking at event. And live streaming of all rooms. This year was no different. My monitor’s screen was split to two Firefox windows: left side kept discussions on Matrix server, right side had live streaming schedule and video of currently attended talk. At same time my phone has “FOSDEM Companion” app started with bookmarks opened to make it easy to check which talks I wanted to see.

At some moments I had two videos started — one waited for start of presentation and second with some other talk running. Once new one started I closed watched one. Simple method of watching part of talk to see is it interesting or not.

There were some talks where I dropped during first few minutes and moved to other one. Something quite hard to do when you are in a middle of a room at normal FOSDEM.

Videos of talks will be available during next few days. I have a page with FOSDEM talks with slides/video links which will get updates during next days.

For the past 4 years I have participated to FOSDEM, a conference about free and open source software for developers. I love this event. It’s a welcome opportunity to see friends, watch great talks and drink excellent Belgium beer.

This year unfortunately it was a remote event. The event was all managed via matrix, a decentralized communication system. There were a few network issues at the beginning, with a pick of more than 11.000 people simultaneously, but in general it went pretty smoothly.

I participated mostly in the “community”, “open source design” and “web performance” rooms. Here is a little summary of what a saw. Hope there is stuff that might trigger your curiosity.

The next step in the recent PDFium-based signature verification story is my Handling PDF digital signatures in LibreOffice with PDFium talk at FOSDEM 2021, in the LibreOffice devroom (pre-recorded video). The talk gives you an overview of digital signing in general, all the ODF/OOXML/PDF handling, signing/verification, various other related past Collabora projects, and then goes into details regarding how PDFium was improved and is used to do a better PDF signature verification in LibreOffice when opening PDF files in Draw.

The virtual room had around 150 participants and the Matrix based online conference was well-organized. Speakers even got a free t-shirt before the event, I appreciated the "bring your own beer" joke

An other benefit of this unusual setup was to avoid the dreaded room is full problems, where you carefully selected a talk to attend and then failed to hear it.

It's rare to hear of OpenOffice usage these days compared to LibreOffice, but the open-source office suite is still going ahead under its volunteer work at the Apache Software Foundation. This past weekend at FOSDEM 2021 was a status update on Apache OpenOffice.

Peter Kovacs provided a status update on Apache OpenOffice on the work and milestones over the past year. Compared to LibreOffice 7.0 in 2020 with Vulkan rendering support and many other new features, Apache OpenOffice just had a maintenance release. But even with OpenOffice not being in the limelight like it once was, it's still seeing over one million downloads per month.