The seventh Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting is a 2 days event, organized by volunteers, to promote the widespread use of Free and Open Source software. Taking place in the beautiful city of Brussels (Belgium), FOSDEM meetings are recognized as "The best Free and Open Source events in Europe."

More info

Mailinglist: fosdem at lists.fosdem.org We will inform you when new information is on the website.

Public Wiki: http://wiki.fosdem.org
RSS feed: http://fosdem.org/rss.xml
Planet Aggregator: http://planet.fosdem.org

What FOSDEM is

FOSDEM is a free and non-commercial event for the community and organised by the community. Its goal is to provide Free and Open Source developers and communities a place to meet to

get in touch with other developers and projects,
get informed about the latest developments in the Free and Open Source world,
attend to interesting talks and presentations held in large conference rooms by Free and Open Source project leaders and commiters on various topics,
and to promote the development and the benefits of Free and Open Source solutions.

As for being a free event, participation and attendance is totally free of charge (although we thankfully accept donations and sponsorship). To help the community, FOSDEM sets up 'DevRooms' (Developer Rooms) where teams can meet and showcase their projects.It is also a place where a team can discuss, code (hacking sessions), publicly present latest directions, lightning talks, news and decisions. The FOSDEM Team thinks it is very important that developers from around the world can meet 'in real life' and we believe projects can benefit from these meetings. Common facilities such as network/internet connectivity and projectors are provided by us.

Last year there were around 143 talks in the developer rooms, and then the main tracks, as well as the LPI exams, plus tutorial sessions and GPG/CAcert key signing.

Some history...

During the year 2000, Raphael Bauduin, a fan of the Linux movement in Belgium, decide to make a small meeting for developers of Open Source Software. He called it: Open Source Developers European Meeting (aka OSDEM).
He created a mailing list, a small website and told about it around him. Just a few weeks later, lots of people were waiting for an exciting event in Brussels.

Raphael sent lots of invitations to known figures: Rasterman, Fyodor, Jeremy Allison and so on. They gave a positive response: the OSDEM was on the road to success.

Many years later, OSDEM has grown to the event we now know as FOSDEM. The event now tries to cover a wide spectrum of open source projects, and wants to offer a platform to people to collaborate in the true open source spirit. Every year, during the last weekend of February, we welcome 3500 visitors at the ULB Solbosh campus. Raphael is no longer the only one behind FOSDEM, altough he still remains very active. A list of The entire staff can be seen here, together with some information on their involvement in the FOSDEM conference.