The eighth FOSDEM is a two-day 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 Software and Open Source events in Europe".

More information

Mailing list: fosdem at lists.fosdem.org.
We will inform you when news about FOSDEM is available.

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

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

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

Participation and attendance is totally free, though the organization gratefully accepts donationals and sponsorships.

The FOSDEM team thinks it is very important for Free Software and Open Source developers around the world to be able to meet in "real life". To this end, we have set up Developer Rooms (DevRooms) with network/internet connectivity and projectors where development teams can meet and showcase their projects. DevRooms are a place for teams to discuss, hack and publicly present latest directions, lightning talks, news and discussions.

We believe developers can benefit a lot from these meetings.

Last year, there were more than 160 talks in the Developer Rooms in addition to the many main-track talks, the lightning talks and the LPI exams and the PGP/CAcert keysigning events.

In 2000, Raphael Bauduin, a fan of the Linux movement in Belgium, decided to organize a small meeting for developers of Open Source software. He called it: Open Source Developers' European Meeting (OSDEM).

Raph created a mailing list, a small website and spread the word to people around him. Only a few weeks later, lots of people were waiting for an exciting event in Brussels!

Invitations were sent to well-known figures in the community: Rasterman, Fyodor, Jeremy Allison and so on. They all gave a very positive response and the OSDEM was on the road to success.

Many years later, OSDEM has grown to the event we now know as FOSDEM.

We now try to cover a wide spectrum of Open Source and Free Software projects, and offer a platform for people to collaborate in the true Open Source spirit. Every year during the last weekend of February we host around 4000 visitors at the ULB Solbosh campus.

Raphael is no longer the only one behind FOSDEM, after 7 years of hard work he left the team for new Open Source plans. A list of the entire staff can be seen here, together with some information on their involvement in the FOSDEM conference.

• Alain Buret
• Christophe Vandeplas
• Dries Verachtert
• Floris Lambrechts
• Gerry Demaret
• Jan Gyselinck
• Jan Van Buggenhout
• Jan-Frederik Martens
• Jochen Maes
• Juan Rial
• Mattias Guns
• Pascal Bleser
• Philip Paeps
• Philippe De Swert
• ...