A Glimpse into the Future of Open-Source Innovation: Embracing the World of Open-Source at #FOSDEM 2024

Brussels, February 3-4, 2024 – The Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM) once again served as a global epicenter for open-source enthusiasts, developers, and innovators, uniting them under one roof to celebrate the transformative power of open-source software and hardware. This year’s edition, held on February 3-4, 2024, in Brussels, Belgium, boasted an impressive lineup of 880 speakers, 818 events, and 66 tracks, encompassing a wide spectrum of topics that left attendees inspired and eager to contribute to the ever-evolving world of open-source.

Day 1: Saturday, February 3, 2024

The inaugural day of FOSDEM 2024 kicked off with a series of thought-provoking presentations that set the tone for the event. Here are some highlights:

• Leon Anavi ignited the morning with his insightful talk, “Screen Sharing on Raspberry Pi 5 Using VNC in Weston and Wayland with the Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded,” delving into the integration of VNC backend into Weston, the reference compositor for the Wayland display server protocol, on the Raspberry Pi 5.
• Daniel Baluta took the stage with his presentation, “Introducing Sound Open Firmware Project,” unveiling an open-source audio DSP firmware and SDK that empowers developers with audio firmware infrastructure and development tools for audio or signal processing on modern DSPs.
• Francesco Dolcini captivated the audience with his talk, “Vanilla Debian On An Industrial Embedded Device,” addressing the challenges and considerations involved in installing and running a non-modified Debian distribution on an industrial arm/arm64 embedded device running the U-Boot bootloader.
• Nitish Bharambe presented “Power Grid Model: Open source high-performance power systems analysis,” introducing the Power Grid Model library, an open-source tool for conducting state estimation, power flow, and short-circuit calculations for symmetric/asymmetric grids.
• Marta Rybczynska delivered an insightful talk, “Embedded Security 2023,” providing an overview of the major developments and challenges in embedded security in 2023, including the rise of SBOM, discussions on the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), and important vulnerabilities.

The afternoon sessions continued to impress with a diverse range of presentations:

• Paul Kocialkowski presented “V4L2 Stateless Video Encoding: Hardware Support and uAPI,” discussing the ongoing effort to bring support for stateless video encoders in mainline V4L2, including an overview of the preliminary work on selected hardware platforms and video codecs.
• Bryan O’Donoghue and Hans de Goede tag-teamed to present “A fully open-source stack for MIPI cameras,” introducing a new open-source SoftwareISP component for libcamera that allows MIPI cameras to function without proprietary software.
• Antoine Gonzalez took the stage with his talk, “enioka Scan: say No! to vendor lock-in for your barcode scanners,” unveiling enioka Scan, an open-source Android library that liberates users from vendor lock-in and simplifies integration with various barcode scanner devices.
• Philipp K. Krause presented “The Small Device C Compiler (SDCC),” providing an overview of the current state, recent improvements, challenges, and future plans for the SDCC compiler, a popular FOSS compiler for 8-bit architectures.
• John Britton captivated the audience with his talk, “Brewing Free Beer with ESPHome and Home Assistant,” demonstrating how to build an inexpensive and internet-connected brewery controller using ESPHome and Home Assistant, empowering users to brew beer using open-source software and hardware.

The day concluded with a series of engaging presentations that left attendees buzzing:

• Tao Xavier and Philipp Oppermann unveiled “Dora-rs: simplifying robotics stack for next gen robots,” introducing Dora-rs, a dataflow framework for robotics that aims to streamline robotic programming, supporting zero-copy messaging, logging, metrics, tracing, and ROS2 integration.
• Bardia Moshiri presented “Droidian – Bridging the gap between various platforms with convergence,” introducing Droidian, a Debian-based GNU/Linux distribution tailored for mobile phones, aiming to build an open and versatile system for smartphones.
• Dario Binacchi captivated the audience with his talk, “Linux CAN upstreaming on MMU-less systems,” discussing the challenges and development process involved in upstreaming the bxCAN driver for Linux kernel on MMU-less systems, including the need to patch user space tools and applications.
• Mohammed Billoo wowed the crowd with his presentation, “Zephyr and RISC-V: I Ain’t Afraid Of No Ghosts,” demonstrating the process of getting Zephyr to run on the UPduino flashed with the neorv32 RISC-V processor, highlighting the opportunities for embedded software applications on low-cost FPGAs.
• Dominik George and Pingu introduced “An open-source, open-hardware offline finding system,” presenting an open implementation of an offline-finding system based on ESP32, Rust, and elliptic-curve cryptography, allowing small devices to communicate with a finder without a network connection.

Day 2: Sunday, February 4, 2024

The second day of FOSDEM 2024 continued to deliver a wealth of knowledge and inspiration, with a focus on open-source hardware, software, and development tools:

• Nathan Egge kicked off the day with his talk, “Testing RISC-V Assembly,” presenting a methodology for testing hand-written RISC-V assembly routines, including resources for generating test cases and using QEMU as a verification tool.
• Joey Castillo captivated the audience with his presentation, “Comprehensible Open Hardware: Building the Open Book,” discussing the design principles and strategies for creating open hardware projects that are easy to understand and build, empowering users to engage with technology on their own terms.
• Yorik van Havre provided an overview of recent advancements and ongoing developments in FreeCAD, a general-purpose open-source 3D modeling software, in his talk, “FreeCAD – state of the union.”
• Wayne Stambaugh kept the momentum going with his presentation, “KiCad Status Update,” offering an update on the progress and achievements of the KiCad project since FOSDEM 2023, including new features and enhancements.
• Urban Bruhin gave an overview of the LibrePCB project, an open-source EDA software for designing PCBS, in his talk, “LibrePCB Status Update,” showcasing its capabilities and live demonstrations.

The afternoon sessions continued to impress with engaging presentations:

• Ahmad Tameem and Umer Imran presented “LLaMa.cpp: Utilizing RISC-V Vector Extension for Improving LLMs Performance,” exploring the integration of RISC-V vector extension with LLaMa.cpp Large Language Models (LLMs), aiming to enhance performance on edge devices.
• Amanda Casari delivered an insightful talk, “The Basic Economics behind Open Source Funding in 2024,” providing a fundamental explanation of economic models for open-source funding, including different types of funds and funders, challenges, and strategies for unblocking funding challenges.
• Ilias Daradimos took the stage with his presentation, “QUBIK a 1p PocketQube satellite platform,” sharing the story of QUBIK, an open-source/open-hardware PocketQube satellite, discussing its mission in space and its ongoing development as an experimentation and educational platform.
• Thanos Patsas presented “A satellite’s final safehouse: The deployer,” introducing PICOBUS, an open-source deployer capable of storing and deploying PocketQube Units in orbit, highlighting its successful launch and deployment of satellites into space.
• Tsvetan Usunov concluded the event with his talk, “Electronic board production automation with KiCAD scripts,” sharing insights into using KiCad scripting to automate electronic board production, including design preparation, machine programming, and changeover processes.

FOSDEM 2024 proved to be a resounding success, bringing together the global open-source community to share knowledge, collaborate, and drive innovation. The event’s focus on community, collaboration, and innovation continues to inspire and empower the open-source community.

Call to Action:

Join the open-source revolution and contribute to the future of technology. Explore the incredible projects showcased at FOSDEM 2024 and find your niche in the open-source world. Together, we can push the boundaries of innovation and create a better, more connected world.