fosdem-2025

We were made aware of planned protests during the upcoming FOSDEM 2025 in response to a scheduled talk which is causing controversy. The talk in question is claimed to be on the schedule for sponsorship reasons; additionally, some of the speakers scheduled to speak during this talk are controversial to some of our attendees.

To be clear, in our 25 year history, we have always had the hard rule that sponsorship does not give you preferential treatment for talk selection; this policy has always applied, it applied in this particular case, and it will continue to apply in the future. Any claims that any talk was allowed for sponsorship reasons are false.

At FOSDEM, we have always allowed and welcomed protest, even when that protest was directed at the organization or one of our sponsors. Open Source and Free Software are inherently political, and as such it is normal and expected that our attendees are more vocal about the wider world, and about FOSDEM in particular. As such, if a peaceful protest were to take place during the talk in question, we will not take action, provided the protest is indeed peaceful and does not disrupt the proceedings.

We would appreciate if anyone organizing a protest would contact us in advance at info@fosdem.org so we can ensure that we’re able to meet our crowd control and fire safety obligations.

FOSDEM Junior is a collaboration between FOSDEM, Code Club, CoderDojo, developers, and volunteers to organize workshops and activities for children during the FOSDEM weekend.

These activities are for children to learn and get inspired about technology. This year’s activities include microcontrollers, embroidery, game development, music, and mobile application development.

Last year we organized the first edition of FOSDEM Junior. We are pleased to announce that we will be back this year.

Registration for individual workshops is required. Links can be found on the page of each activity. The full schedule can be viewed at the junior track schedule page.

You can contact the organisers by using the dedicated email address: junior@fosdem.org. There is a mailing list for public discussions about FOSDEM Junior, which can be subscribed to via junior-discuss.

The deadline for talk submissions is rapidly approaching!

If you are interested in talking at FOSDEM this year (yes, I'm talking to you!), it's time to polish off and submit those proposals in the next few days before the 1st:

• Devrooms: follow the instructions in each cfp listed here
• Main tracks: for topics which are more general or don't fit in a devroom, select 'Main' as the track here
• Lightning talks: for short talks (15 minutes) on a wide range of topics, select 'Lightning Talks' as the track here

With great pleasure we can announce that the following projects will have a stand at FOSDEM 2025 (1st & 2nd February).

This is the list of stands (in alphabetic order):

• 0 A.D. Empires Ascendant
• AlekSIS and Teckids
• AlmaLinux OS
• CalyxOS
• Ceph
• Chamilo
• CISO Assistant
• Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)
• Codeberg and Forgejo
• coreboot / flashprog / EDKII / OpenBMC
• Debian
• DeepComputing's DC-ROMA RISC-V Mainboard with Framework Laptop 13
• DevPod
• Digital Public Goods
• Dolibarr ERP CRM
• Drupal
• Eclipse Foundation
• Fedora Project
• FerretDB
• Firefly Zero
• FOSSASIA
• Free Software Foundation Europe
• FreeBSD Project
• FreeCAD and KiCAD
• Furi Labs
• Gentoo Linux & Flatcar Container Linux
• GitLab
• GNOME
• GNU Radio
• Grafana
• GraphQL and Graphile
• GÉANT & NRENs - the Research and Education community
• Haiku
• Hex sticker booth by NLnet Foundation
• Homebrew
• Immich
• Infostand on amateur radio
• Jenkins
• Joplin
• KDE
• Kotlin community stand
• Let's Encrypt
• Libre Space Foundation
• LibreOffice Community
• Linphone
• Linux on Mobile
• Luanti (formerly Minetest)
• MariaDB Foundation
• Mastodon
• Mattermost
• Meshtastic
• metal-stack
• MicroPython & Espruino
• Mozilla
• MySQL
• Nostr
• Open Culture Foundation and Taiwan Open Source community
• Open Food Facts
• Open Source Analytics Community
• Open Source at CERN
• OpenFlexure Microscope
• openHAB
• OpenRemote (Call for Stands)
• openSUSE Project
• Overte
• Panoramax
• Percona
• Perl and Raku Stand
• PostgreSQL
• postmarketOS
• privacyIDEA
• Prossimo
• Proxmox Virtual Environment
• Prusa Research
• Qt Project
• Qubes OS and Genode OS
• Realtime Lounge
• Rocky Linux
• Software Freedom Conservancy
• Software Heritage
• SOGo Webmail
• The Matrix.org Foundation
• The Zephyr Project
• Thunderbird
• TinyGo, Mechanoid & WasmVision
• Ubuntu Community
• Vates Virtualization and Management Stack
• VideoLAN
• WHY2025 (hacker camp) & badge.team (hacker event badges)
• WireGuard and Linux Kernel RNG
• Wireshark
• XWiki & CryptPad

We will announce the location of every stand closer to the event.

We now invite proposals for presentations.

FOSDEM offers open source and free software developers a place to meet, share ideas and collaborate. Renowned for being highly developer-oriented, the event brings together some 8000+ geeks from all over the world.

The twenty-fifth edition will take place on Saturday 1st and Sunday 2nd February 2025 at the usual location, ULB Campus Solbosch in Brussels.

Developer Rooms

For more details about submission to Developer Rooms, please refer to each devroom's Call for Participation listed here.

Main Tracks

Main track presentations cover topics of interest to a significant part of our audience that do not fit into any of the developer rooms, perhaps because of the topic or the large size of the anticipated audience. Presentations should be 50 minutes long including audience questions. Where necessary, FOSDEM covers reasonable travel expenses agreed in advance and arranges accommodation for accepted main track speakers.

Questions or remarks? Contact us at program@fosdem.org.

Lightning talks

Lightning talks are short (15 minute) talks on a wide variety of topics. Anyone who has something interesting to say about a free software or open source project or topic can apply. We particularly encourage topics that do not fit into any of the other tracks.

Questions or remarks? Contact us at lightningtalks@fosdem.org.

Submission

All proposals for presentations at the event should be submitted through pretalx: https://fosdem.org/submit. When making a proposal, please select the appropriate track.

If the topic fits into a Developer Room, then please refer to that room's call for papers, listed here. and select that room as the "track". Select Lightning Talks for the main Lightning Talks track outside the developer rooms (but not for lightning talks inside devrooms).

The deadline for submissions is 1st December.

The conference language is English. All content must relate to Free and Open Source Software. By participating in the event you agree to the publication of recordings, slides and other content provided under the same licence as all FOSDEM content (CC-BY). You also accept the FOSDEM Code of Conduct.

All deadlines are at 23:59 UTC.

We are pleased to announce the developer rooms that will be organised at FOSDEM 2025.

Developer rooms are assigned to self-organising groups to work together on open source projects, to discuss topics relevant to a broader subset of the community, etc. The individual developer room organisers will issue their calls for participation in the next few days. The list below will be updated accordingly.