Day One - FOSDEM 2025

The one bad thing about going to bed earlier at night is that you no longer have the luxury of sleeping in late as your sleep quota finishes off quickly. At least that is what I thought happened to me when I woke up as early as 0400am Central European Time - about a couple of hours before the scheduled alarm. I took some time to get in touch with my family members in India and even they were surprised to hear from me as early as around 0830am Indian Standard Time at their end. My bid for assistance with setting up the Fedora Project FOSDEM 2025 booth from the previous night was also responded to well by the likes of Daniel Mellado, Greg Sutcliffe, Sumantro Mukherjee, Luis Bazan and Fernando Mancera, so we happened to be the ones making up the initial Fedora Project presence.

Justin W. Flory had booked a van in advance to pick us up from the Moxy Brussels City Center hotel at around 0715am Central European Time. I headed downstairs to meet up with Luis over breakfast and we were soon joined by Sumantro and Greg at the table. Like the previous day, I decided to have a minimal breakfast and that way I could ensure that I could stay moving throughout the day without any issues. There was a little uncertainty around me getting lunch on 01st February 2025 but as that would not be the first time that I would have been powering through a free and open source software conference while starving - I did not give it much thought. On the breakfast table, Greg showed us the wide assortment of 3D printed gizmos for booths that I earlier termed as "fancy camping equipment".

In some time from then, we had a van arrive at the gate and with a breakfast-deprived Justin coming to the reception area, we boarded the van bound for the ULB Solbosch Campus. As that day was the first day of FOSDEM 2025, we had to haul the booth equipment case from the hotel to Building K where the Fedora Project booth was assigned for both of the days. Unfortunately, CentOS Projectfor was not assigned a booth and hence, they were stationed in the Fedora Project booth. Weaving through the relatively peaceful morning traffic, the seven of us reached the event venue soon and coincidentally found Tomas Hrcka at the entrance. In hindsight, knowing Tomas personally - that was less likely to be a mere coincidence and more likely to be a well-timed arrival planning made by him.

After sharing some warm embraces on meeting him after such a long time, we started walking together towards Building K with the booth equipment case. I was looking forward to our presence amidst the hustle and bustle of our assigned hall after the strange placements that we have had in the last couple of years - the claustrophobia inducing Building H during FOSDEM 2023 and distantly excluded Building AW during FOSDEM 2024. When we reached our designated booth location, Luis and I got started with setting up the Fedora Project standees while Sumantro and Fernando were setting up the desk with swags. We soon realized that there was not enough space to be stationed behind the booth desk for the attendants and hence, we resorted to moving the desk a bit ahead for convenience.

Following our example, the booth attendants present at the Debian Project booth on our left side and the AlmaLinux Foundation booth on our right side decided to make some space behind their booth desks too. While I was offered coffee by Greg and Justin who were about to depart for the order, I decided to focus on keeping myself hydrated to ensure that I was able to talk throughout the day. Before leaving, Justin provided a Framework laptop and Slimbook laptop loaded with a custom installation of Fedora Workstation 41 to myself and Sumantro respectively. As I started setting up SyncStar on the provided kiosk laptop, I soon realized that there was some issue with the laptop's charging and hence, resorted to using my own loaded with Fedora Linux 41's KDE Plasma spin for the same purpose.

Even when Sumantro was setting up the provided kiosk laptop with OpenWebUI and Stable Diffusion, he realized that the Slimbook did not have a discrete graphics processing unit inside of it even when the stickers on the laptop stated otherwise. While we wished that we had been provided with these laptops sometime before the event commenced, Sumantro used the provided laptop as a kiosk display for advertising the 2025 edition of our yearly contributor conference, Flock To Fedora while I used the provided laptop as a frontend screen for SyncStar. We were soon visited by Shaun McCance who provided us with a portable display and as much as we wanted to use it for the displaying of the Fedora Badges event QR code, we had to wait for a while before the said event QR code was fixed before we could do it.

With some time left amidst the power outage in our row of booths in Building K and before the footfall gradually ended up taking off, Sumantro, Luis and I decided to order FOSDEM 2025 tees from the event booth right in front of ours. It was of prime importance for us to get the tees quickly as the sizes that we were seeking went out of stock in an instant and having the event volunteer booth adjacent to that of ours was as opportunistic as it got. Following that, Sumantro and I made a swift trip through the Building K booths and we met up with Greg attending the Matrix Foundation booth on the first floor. After getting my Matrix account jokingly "banned" by him for asking "When was the estimated release date of the fifth Matrix movie?", the two of us made it back to our booth - Fun times!

While attending to the visitors at our booth, I worked with Shaun to arrange the CentOS Project swags on the right side of the desk. Being the fast learner that Luis was, he started arranging the Fedora Project swags on the left side of the desk. Funnily enough, I had a CentOS Linux shirt on so I was representing both the communities on the same desk. Although the initial slots were not assigned to me and Justin offered me a break in between, I soon realized that I was barely fifteen minutes away from my assigned booth duty time. At around 0900am Central European Time, the footfall dramatically increased in Building K and it became quite challenging to keep up with the attendees at our booth inquiring about the subprojects and SIGs within Fedora Project and CentOS Project communities.

As I was addressing the booth attendees, I was involved in conversations ranging from distribution specific questions like "What value does CentOS Stream bring to the table after the departure of CentOS Linux?", "How good Fedora Linux is for someone using GNU/Linux distributions on their desktop" etc. to corporate bound questions like "What is the strategical input of the likes of Fedora Linux and CentOS Stream to Red Hat Enterprise Linux?", "How is Red Hat maintaining the autonomy of decisions after the IBM purchase" etc. Amidst the flagship FOSDEM 2025 rush in Building K and rising decibel values of people conversations, I was committed to ensuring that the answers that I provided folks with were as accurate as possible and in other rare cases, provided them resources for more information.

Among a bunch of faces that I was addressing at the booth for the first time, I also came across a bunch of friendly faces with whom I have had the pleasure of collaborating in the past like Michael Scherer, Pierre-Yves Chibon, Troy Dawson, Richard Brown, Carl W. George, Ananthu CV, Asmit Malakannawar, Deepesha Burse and many others. Before closing my assigned booth duty time - I briefed the booth attendants to clear any confusion around teams that people might not be aware of like RPM Distribution Of OpenStack, NeuroFedora and many others. After all, I wanted the details we shared from our booth to be accurate regardless of whoever was sharing them. At around 0100pm Central European Time, I joined Sumantro who had already left in advance for a rotation around Building K.

As much as I wanted to visit booths present in other buildings to have a complete FOSDEM 2025 experience, I restricted myself to Building K to ensure that I was available to render assistance whenever it was needed at our booth. I ran into a couple of Sumantro's acquaintances from the Mozilla Foundation with whom we caught up on conversations before departing to visit other booths. I was already through with my interest in swags after visiting the FOSDEM for the third year so I focused on meeting as many folks as I could at the community presence booths. Luis joined me after some time and after ensuring that our booth was properly staffed, the two of us departed to visit the booths around the place - with me somehow being more familiar with this college campus than I was with my own.

With our booth left in the capable hands of David Cantrell, Jona Azizaj, Greg and Carl, I finished off the Chicken Sandwich that Luis brought for me before leaving the place. We went through the booths belonging to OpenSUSE Foundation, Debian Project, AlmaLinux Foundation, WireGuard Project, LibreOffice Project, XWIKI Project, Mozilla Foundation, Zephyr Project, Haiku Project, Luanti or Minetest Project, postmarketOS Community and many others while interacting with their booth staff to have an understanding of their current affairs on the ground floor of Building K. After that, we headed over to the first floor where we met up with the staff at the booths belonging to Software Freedom Conservancy, Ceph, VideoLAN, LetsEncrypt/Prossimo, Free Software Foundation Europe etc.

At the WireGuard Project booth, I remarked on the feature-complete nature of the codebase and its kernel modules when there were questions about the absence of updates since 2019 made to a booth managed by just one person. It was interesting to see how the folks from the Haiku Project were distributing their operating system image in relatively archaic compact disks like the good old times instead of using flash drives. Being a selfhosting enthusiast myself, I had a great conversation with the folks at the XWIKI booth whom I told that I have been running their service for quite a while now. I shared some interesting conversations at the LetsEncrypt booth regarding the reasons behind their decision to discontinue notification emails on certificate expiry and resonated with their lack of resources.

The swags I was retaining from visiting various booths throughout the ULB Solbosch Campus mostly consisted of selfies with the booth staff. At the Luanti or Minetest Project booth, we discussed the reasoning behind renaming the project to Luanti. It was interesting to see how much the codebase had grown from being just a prototype to being a full-blown project with its ecosystem. At the postmarketOS Community booth, I discussed with the booth staff about the struggles that they have faced with the closed source device trees that most recent Qualcomm devices have resorted to having - thereby making it increasingly difficult for them to make releases that support recent devices. After swiftly moving through the crowded VideoLAN booth, we made it across to the Taiwan Open Source Community stand.

While I would have enjoyed participating in the raffle to stand a chance to win a VideoLAN-themed traffic cone headgear, the place was a bit too crowded for my liking and hence, I decided to have a conversation with the folks from the Taiwan Open Source Community. Following the discussion that I had with Sumantro and Justin on the previous day, I had a conversation with them about the potential Fedora Project presence during COSCUP 2025. After a couple of photographs with the staff there, Luis and I briefly visited some RISC-V community booths before leaving for Building H. Walking beside the green lawn in the ULB Solbosch Campus, the one thing that felt strikingly uncanny was the warm sunshine and clear skies that we had on that day - which was a rare occurrence in FOSDEM.

FOSDEM conferences are usually complemented with weather that is either drenched raining or gloomily overcast but none of that happened to be the case in FOSDEM 2025. Perhaps, the free and open source software gods - if they exist that is - decided to cut us some slack after the couple of rainy days we faced with the CentOS Connect 2025. Going through the food stands in the middle of the campus, Luis and I made it to Building H where we came across booths from communities like Grafana OSS, Deep Computing Inc., GraphQL/Graphite Project, NOSTR Project, Wireshark Project, Proxmox VE Project, Mastodon Community and many others. We soon made it to Building AW where we met up with the folks from GNOME Project, KDE Organization, TinyGo, GNU Radio, Meshtastic and others.

We were nearly about through with the exploration when I decided to take a detour to cut through Building UA and Building UB to check the booths present and developer rooms organized there. At around 0230pm Central European Time, Luis and I decided to head back to Building K after he had a quick break at Building UA. On reaching the booth, I decided to take a seat after briefly meeting up with Sudhir Dharanendraiah while Carl and Greg were taking care of our booth. I was soon visited by Tomas whom I provided him some Indian spices that I got for him right before he was about to leave for the day. With Carl briefly leaving to get his water bottle refilled, I decided to take charge again with Greg and our booth was soon visited by the likes of Karanbir Singh, Fabian Arrotin and Mike McLean.

Chris and Seddik did amazing work with judiciously supplying swags to the booth desk while we were gradually running out of the Fedora Project themed swags. We were also giving away the leftover tee shirts from CentOS Connect 2025 as swags - even though we were not at the state in which we could have provided folks with the sizes that they were seeking. At around 0330pm Central European Time, I had a couple of interesting conversations about SyncStar on how the batch processing of the USB flash drives could be extended further for different purposes. Even though Greg moved into a technical role within the Red Hat Community Linux Engineering team, the way he handled tricky interactions at our booth spoke volumes about just how great he was during his community management stint.

I decided to take some precautionary measures during troubling interactions like these to ensure that the conversations were not taken out of context to serve a specific narrative. As unfortunate as it was, occurrences like these were very common in a free and open source software conference as widely known as FOSDEM. Events like these go on to reinforce the justification behind why someone would want to stick to the facts as much as possible while attending to the booth visitors. To that extent, it is even acceptable to admit that there is insufficient information available on the situation rather than imparting inadequate details that might be up to misinterpretation. Greg appreciated how vigilant I was in these situations after having experienced them multiple times.

At around 0400pm Central European Time, we were visited by Matthew Miller who had been down with some ailment. I decided to let Greg have a conversation with him to fill him in with the said occurrence while I stayed back with Chris and Jona to discuss the situation. With Luis and Carl back at the booth, the five of us decided to start planning for the booth deconstruction. We were instructed to have the area cleaned up by 0530pm Central European Time and as we wanted to leave some of our supplies with the FOSDEM 2025 event volunteers in their locker area, we wanted to be able to be through with the cleanup by around 0515pm Central European Time. Following the instructions in the document provided to us by the FOSDEM event volunteers, we gradually began wrapping up our operation there.

After a brief check with Justin, Chris and I started wrapping up the booth desk while Jona and Luis helped safely deliver the booth equipment to the locker area. Carl helped with extending the area behind the booth desk a bit more as we soon ran out of the area that was made available from the extension in the morning. By 0520pm Central European Time, we were done wrapping things up before the actual rush began from the other booth attendants. Greg and I decided to not wait for a collective cab back to the hotel and instead take a bus back to the stand near the Moxy Brussels City Center hotel. As there was a Fedora Project and CentOS Project Contributor Dinner arranged later in the evening, the two of us wanted to ensure that we had some resting downtime before we had to depart for the same.

Coincidentally, Michael happened to be on the same crowded bus number #71 bound from De Brouckère and after a conversation with Greg on the way Fedora Council should conduct community surveys, I decided to briefly join Michael. As luck would have had it, the already long day dragged on to become a bit longer with a lady attempting to force open the closed automated doors of a bus leading them to stop working. That was followed by a heated argument between the driver and the offending lady on the situation of which Greg and myself understood almost nothing from. The information display soon showed that the bus was "Out Of Service" and after staring at each other's faces confused for about a couple of minutes, the two of us decided to depart from the bus to walk to the next bus stop.

We had a swift retrospective on the tricky conversations that we had on that day while we saw around three police vehicles with sirens blaring zoom past us on the opposite side. While it was an alarming occurrence, I decided not to read too much into it until the situation ended up becoming dire and focused instead on catching another bus back to the hotel. We soon found another ride that Greg swore was the one that we originally got off from and by around 0545pm Central European Time, we made it back to our respective rooms. I decided to have some conversations with my family and friends who were just about to head to their bed before coming to the reception area at around 0745pm Central European Time. I met up with Daniel, Luis, Matthew and Greg so the five of us decided to head for the restaurant.

There was initial confusion about the designated location for dinner but Justin was able to swiftly resolve it before the communication to various folks could have gone haywire. We soon found ourselves at the hotel after around a fifteen-minute walk to the restaurant and with Justin scanning our registration QR codes, we decided to head indoors in a waiting area as it was growing colder by the passing minute. We were unfortunately made to wait until around 0900pm Central European Time as the restaurant that we were allotted to was booked over the allowed capacity of guests. In the meanwhile, I met up with Bhagyashree Padalkar and Mikel Olasagasti in the waiting corridor along with Sudhir, Jona and Sumantro deeper inside the restaurant as we were served drinks by the attendants.

I did not have drinks that evening to ensure that I was not deprived of hydration any more than I already was at that point. Moving into the restaurant corridor, I finally found some time with Sudhir for some conversations when he told me that Petr Hracek, who was reporting to him then and was mentoring me within Red Hat, mentioned great things about me. It is always great to be lauded and I also checked in with how things are at his end after a major organizational change within Red Hat. After the conversation with him was through, I joined a group consisting of Frantisek Lachman, Siteshwar Vashisht and Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek for some conversations. We were soon called for as the other restaurant finally had vacant spots for seating us at around 0915pm Central European Time.

While a verbal altercation from some time before due to a minor disagreement left a bad taste in my mouth, I maintained restraint and decided against reporting the situation to the community governance. In retrospect, the first half of the reason behind tolerating such disorderly behaviour could be attributed to my being very tired and the second half of the reason could be wanting to not accidentally make the situation worse when a bunch of folks were already vexed after the arduous delay in the dinner. Even then, the restaurant did not have enough seating for every one of us and hence, Daniel and I had to be seated at an extended table with chairs beside a couple of friends from the Forgejo Community, Tomas and Carl - and we were inconvenienced every time someone was passing through that area.

Throughout dinner, we had a great catchup with the friends from the Forgejo Community about topics ranging from the reasons behind hard forking away from Gitea and the future plans of the community. I was gradually served a starter consisting of Cheese Fondue and vegetable salad, a main course of Chicken Vol Au Vent and French Fries and a dessert of Chocolate Mousse with cream wafer. It took until 1130pm Central European Time for both my and Daniel's meals to be over and the long wait times made us contemplate leaving sooner. While there was a photograph session planned for until after the dinner, we were sure that it must have been called off amidst the derailed dinner plans. Daniel and I decided to say our goodbyes and walk back to the hotel after the food to prepare for the next day.