Stéphane BortzmeyerGood morning, Brussels! First day of #FOSDEM 2026. Lots of people and lots of talks.
Keynote starts: "FOSDEM is the center of open source" "The center of Belgium" "The center of the European Union" "The center of the free world"
First slide with "sovereignty" on it. "If we lose democracy, open source will be irrelevant"
"Open source was always about politics"
The numbers: 1014 events, 1186 speakers, 66 track/devrooms
"Don't skip the food queue but let staff and volunteers do it."
And if the room is full, or if you are remote: https://fosdem.org/schedule/streaming/
"FOSS in times of war, scarcity and (adversarial) AI", talk by Michiel Leenaars "We need to talk about war"'
Because not everything at #FOSDEM can be fun.
[FOSS = Free / Open Source Software. AI = generating funny answers to stupid questions]
The growth of the Internet and of free software was during a time of [relative] peace and hope, after the end of the cold war [in Europe]. It was ideal and we forgot about war, dictatorship and other nasty things.
Then, we moved to hyperscalers/ GAFAM
"Cloud first strategy" means you're proud of your incompetence.
And with deliberate attacks (think supply-chain), free software is in the battleground.
And we are not ready for that.
Hey, but there are a lot of free seats in the Social Web devroom at #FOSDEM. Come and join us!
Starting "Tending the Herd: Community at Mastodon"
Purely corporate speak from Mastodon official, boring and self-serving. (And insisting that new users should be directed to one specific instance, but no longer mastodon.social, but mandatory Mastodon and have to agree with the terms of use.)
Now, Benjamin Bellamy (not the artist, the other one), "Amplify Our Voices: Building Digital Sovereignty on the Fediverse"
"There is a guy who does a lot of work to help the fediverse and to push people toward it. His name is Donald Trump."
Unlike the previous talk (which was purely corporate), this one talks about the limitations of ActivityPub / the fediverse and about alternatives (AT, Nostr).
#Castopod software: fediverse podcast hosting platfom.
https://castopod.org
"tags.pub - following hashtags globally" by Evan Prodromou
#HashtagsAreGreat But following hashtags is not global (you may miss toots that did not arrive on your instance)
Idea: an instance for hashtags (tags.pub) where each hashtag has its account. Instances that choose to partcipate will write to these accounts. Following a hashtag will be subscribing to these accounts.
"Increasing Long Term Stability of Relations Between Fediverse Identities using Self-Sovereign Identity"
DID identities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_identifier
"How to level up the fediverse" at #FOSDEM.
By Christine Lemmer-Webber and Jessica Talon
There are still things to improve (portable content and identity, security, easier self-hosting...)
Use content addressing? It requires the ability to add source(s) of data, like with magnets.
Naming in a fully decentralized way? Pet names (local names but with the ability to use contact's names; an old idea, GNU net has it, and UUCP before).
Interesting idea: stop having different servers for different uses (Pleroma, Pixelfed, Peertube...), having only generic servers but task-specific (or generic) clients.
This also depends on the client-server part of Activity Pub. I believe noone implements it.
"Fediverse integration into EU public administration".
Many tests (personal opinion: write-only accounts, with only official newspeak).
Cute pictures with the GoBGP mascot on the slides.
(By the way, GoBGP is the third free software BGP daemon, the others being BIRD and FRR.)
"STUNMESH-go: Building P2P WireGuard Mesh Without Self-Hosted Infrastructure" With STUN, traffic always go through. But restoring end-to-end transparency is hard on today's Internet.
[Last news from France: the governement announces it will work on a ban of VPNs.]
The way I understand it, "peer to peer rendez-vous" is done by indicating addresses:ports in the DNS through Cloudflare API. Works fine but not really P2P.
Now, a talk, using AI and blockchain in Kubernetes. (No, just kidding.)
"A Toolset for the Internet of Threads (IoTh): Fine-Grained IPv6 Networking in User Space"
Internet of threads: give IP addresses to processes/services, not to machines.
A usermode library to do nice things with the network: libnlq https://github.com/virtualsquare/libnlq
and for implementing Internet of Threads: libioth https://github.com/virtualsquare/libioth
There is also a #DNS server (authoritative and forwarder) : https://github.com/virtualsquare/iothnamed
And now, we are "Building an Open Source Private 5G Network: A Practical Blueprint"
Will it be installed on the #FOSDEM premises?
Erwan 🚄@bortzmeyer And openBGPd , and exabgpd
@R1Rail I'll transmit to the speaker.
@R1Rail Question posée. L'auteur connait mais n'était pas trop sûr des performances d'exabgpd et que openbgpd ait une API (et openbgpd ne tourne que sur BSD, non ?)
Denis 
@bortzmeyer Non, il existe une version portable d'OpenBGPd. Pour l'API tout dépend de ce que l'auteur attend mais il y a "des choses"
@bortzmeyer exabgpd je ne l'ai utilisé que our injecter des null route, openbgpd je sais qu'il existe et c'est tout
Joël Vimenet@bortzmeyer different accounts per type of content on the same instance?
@bortzmeyer it’s the client that is able to only display the content with the correct type and drops the rest? It means that it has to download all the feed to only display some the subset it is compatible with?
@joelvim I think that's the idea but it does not have to download everything, the server could offer a view / filter ability.
@bortzmeyer interesting! It would allow to subscribe to a single account for all of its content. Not having to rebuild our list of accounts to follow on each platform.
Astro@bortzmeyer https://git.orlives.de/schmittlauch/Hash2Pub would have been a truly decentralized hashtags distribution service.
Evan Prodromou@astro @bortzmeyer are you here? Can we talk?
@astro @bortzmeyer I think we need to find a good public distribution solution. I talked about the AP hack for public posts to the shared inbox a couple of weeks ago. It would be interesting to look into something like IPFS for this instead. But we need something that pushes, doesn't require polling.
@astro @bortzmeyer ok, maybe we can chat online over the next week or two. It'd be nice to coordinate.
Trolli Schmittlauch 🦥@astro
@evan
@bortzmeyer I unfortunately did not continue my work on that, but just a few days someone contacted me that they did something similar for web independently: https://docs.octothorp.es/
They only discovered my work afterwards.
@evan
@bortzmeyer I unfortunately did not continue my work on that, but just a few days someone contacted me that they did something similar for web independently: https://docs.octothorp.es/
They only discovered my work afterwards.
James Smith 💾@bortzmeyer followed by *extremely nervous* scattered ironic applause 🤣
Bradley M. Kühn@bortzmeyer overheard at #FOSDEM
> “There is a guy who does a lot of work to help the fediverse and to push people toward it. His name is Donald Trump.”
This statement contains multitudes b/c #TruthSocial is a fork of #Mastodon. Initially, $DJT violated the #AGPLv3, but AFAIK they now comply with the license. I examined the fork & they primary code they added was an advertising platform. Obviously it doesn't have federation turned on.
Cc: @jzb
nicole mikołajczyk 🔜 linux app summit ➡️ piwo ➡️ gpn@bkuhn @bortzmeyer @jzb saying that ‘initially, Truth Social violated AGPLv3’ gives copyright troll vibes to me. They were running some internal tests on public domains without announcing them. They made the source code available before launch (they’d likely do this no matter the legal actions because their then-head of engineering was at least a FOSS believer).
But now they haven’t updated the published source code for years so they’re not really compliant anymore.
We verified they violated #AGPLv3. I coordinated with #Mastodon folks on an enforcement action to gain compliance.
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/oct/21/trump-group-agplv3/
It was not a test version. It was the site. The public could sign up for accounts and many members of the general public signed up for accounts and received accounts.
The violation continued for a number of months thereafter.
I have all the receipts.
Cc:
@jzb @bortzmeyer
Trump's Social Media Platform and the Affero General Public License (of Mastodon)
An analysis: Trump's Group has 30 days to remedy the violation, or their rights in the software are permanently terminatedIn 2002, we used phrases like “Web 2.0” and “AJAX” to describe the revolution that was happening in web technology for average consumers. This was just before names like Twitter and Facebook became famous worldwide. Web 2.0 was the groundwork infrastructure of the “social media” to come.
@bkuhn @jzb @bortzmeyer Yeah, it was technically public, but it was clearly not meant to be public. Quoting you:
All the evidence available on the Internet (as of 2021-10-22) indicates that the site was simply deployed live early as a test, and without proper configuration
While they technically violated the license, the only thing that makes any actions taken before official launch morally correct is Truth Social being Trump's platform.
You're quoting me out of context there.
My point was they just put the test into production too early. It was indeed misconfigured. But their site was encouraging people to sign up and they were giving out accounts.
The argument they do not need to give source when a beta or test release is launched is the same incorrect argument Lindows made in 2002.
https://www.theregister.com/2002/04/12/fsf_ask_lindows_wheres/
My position on this hasn't changed in 25 years.
I would like to know more though about the evidence you have that shows the CCS available doesn't match. Lack of a new release does not prove a violation. It's just something to raise suspicion, and suspicion is not proof.
And of course their changes can't possibly be useful upstream.
But copyleft is also for transparency.
@bkuhn @jzb @bortzmeyer There are features of Truth Social frontend I can list that are not available in the provided source code. I think even Alex Gleason (the author of Soapbox, a fork of another fork of Mastodon frontend) who worked for TMTG mentioned it after resigning.
My point was how fascinating the comment is because it has layers. I was giving the speaker the benefit of the doubt that they knew all the fascinating layers.
A lot of really smart creative people at FOSDEM so it could well be.