Highlights from FOSDEM 2025: Key Takeaways

The first weekend of February I had the pleasure to attend the FOSDEM 2025 conference in Brussels. This university event brought me a lot of insight into the future of the Open Source world and how I can work within it. Although a lot of attendees come to visit the more technical dev-rooms to learn more about Rust or Swift, I tried to come as close to a 50-50 split between the more community and policy focused talks and tracks that go deep on AI in open-source.

Saturday

I started the day community dev-room where I came to see the Build a Great Business on Open Source without Selling Your Soul - this was the second talk of that day as it is paramount to come early to get a seat in the lecture halls. This talk emphasized ways of monetizing successful open-source projects through feature development, enterprise support, consulting, education. All these aspects come together in three different models of structuring business around the OSS.

Another highlight of this day was To Mine Or Not To Mine - Training of (Generative) AI Models under the TDM Exception in EU Copyright Laws, in which the speaker highlights how lacking definition, structuring and comprehension of law-makers in the field of AI contributes to an unhealthy ecosystem where businesses and developers are left with a lot ambiguity and possible legal threat models which affect core functionalities of the business, opening them up for lawsuits. In a talk on Scaling Open-Source Solutions to Achieve the Sustainable Development Goal I had also learned about DGP (Digital Public Good) and its new members: Wikipedia, Open Food Facts and the Tor browser. Some references I took away from the mentions by the UN Members are:

• OSSCoP

• OSS4SDG

• <UNLOCKED/> - I was unable to find this newsletter online.

• UN OpenSource Portal

• Reboot The Earth

A presented list of opportunities associated with OSS in the EU can be found below, taken from this slide-deck.

Sunday

The last day of the conference I started in the Cybersecurity rooms where I was met with an interesting concept of the contrast between anonymity and surveillance. These talks explored various methods of de-centralized communication and proof of ownership which was reliant only on the end-user to verify in order to avoid third-party trust necessity. Trustchain was a big highlight of the security talks, touching on DIDs and Verifiable Credentials. Continuing the day I attended a talk in one of the main tracks on how to build better README files for open source projects, which much more than anything stressed the need for automation, clarity and the overall sanity of the community.

Attending FOSDEM 2025 was an enlightening experience that provided a comprehensive view of the current and future landscape of open-source technology. The conference highlighted the diverse ways in which open-source projects can be monetized while maintaining their core values, as well as the legal and ethical challenges posed by AI developments. The discussions on sustainable development and cybersecurity underscored the importance of collaboration and innovation in addressing global challenges. Overall, FOSDEM 2025 reinforced the critical role of open-source communities in driving technological advancement and societal progress.