Feedback from FOSDEM in Brussels (Belgium) in 2026: https://fosdem.org/2026/ and https://fosdem.org/2026/about/.
Vibe
Like last year, I focused more on the social aspect and discussions than trying to cram as many presentations as possible into two days.
There were more people than last year. FOSDEM is becoming increasingly popular. This year was the first time I was unable to attend the closing presentation of FOSDEM because there were too many participants in a room that can accommodate 1,500 people!
In particular, gyptazy, a member of the community, shared the feeling that this year has been a turning point, with a sharp increase in attendance:
But in 2026, it felt like something had shifted.
Read more here: https://gyptazy.com/blog/fosdem-2026-opensource-conference-brussels/
Interesting discussions
This year, I wasn't able to participate in a BoF (Birds Of a Feather) session, and unfortunately there weren't any organized around geospatial topics.
But I did get to chat with a few people from the community, including:
Vates, a virtualization solution that positions itself as an open source alternative to Proxmox and VMWare but based on Xen technology.
François Lacombe, who shared his Podoma project with me, which I will discuss in the next section.
Talks
Geospatial
This is the second year that the Geospatial track has returned to FOSDEM. And the Geospatial community at FOSDEM seems to be growing, as this year the room could accommodate 190 people compared to 75 last year!
The only presentation I managed to attend was Podoma, by François Lacombe, who presented a tool for visualizing OpenStreetMap contributions. This tool was created out of a need to better understand the evolution of contributions to OSM. It includes a podium system to highlight the biggest contributors in specific areas.
Other Geospatial presentations are available here: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/track/geospatial/
Infrastructure
Garage Object Storage: 2.0 update and best practices
The Garage team presents its second major release. Garage is software for hosting a self-hosted S3 API.
The enthusiasm for the project is much greater than when I attended its launch presentation two years ago. This is mainly because Minio is no longer open source, so the community has turned to Garage.
I noted quite a few tips on how to use Garage, particularly regarding hosting. This could be very useful for an S3 deployment on GeoServer.
PostgreSQL and MySQL, Two Databases, Three Perspectives
A great talk that clearly explains the internal differences between PostgreSQL and MySQL. It covers areas such as replication, the database engine, client connections, and more.
This talk highlights the value of drawing inspiration from MySQL's strengths in order to improve PostgreSQL accordingly.
Building ISOs from OCI containers
I was intrigued by this talk because at Camptocamp, many of us write Dockerfiles, but to deploy an application in a container.
The idea of being able to deploy this container as a virtual machine or even physically via a USB key is interesting!
This talk discussed the Containerfile format, a variant of Dockerfile, for generating an ISO file from a syntax familiar to that of a Dockerfile.
Other very interesting talks
The Servo project and its impact on the web platform ecosystem
Servo is a rendering engine for web pages. This talk presents the impact that Servo has on the web ecosystem.
It was accompanied by a demo where the presenter showed the rendering of complex web pages such as GitHub, Wikipedia, playing on Chess.com, and even his presentation was in Servo!
This is super exciting, because only three browser rendering engines dominate the web, and one more is really welcome!
Who Pays Your Bills? Sustainability, Community, and Business: The Open Source Triangle
Closely related to geospatial technology because the presenter is part of the QGIS team.
This presentation explains how to find the financial balance between the three pillars of an open source project: community, product, and business.
To view the other 1,073 talks
All talks have been recorded and can be viewed by selecting the desired theme and then the specific talk: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/rooms/
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