FOSS Backstage 2026
2026-03-16..2026-03-17
-- online --
[FOSS Backstage 2021, FOSS Backstage 2022, FOSS Backstage 2023, FOSS Backstage 2024, FOSS Backstage 2025, FOSS Backstage 2026]
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Can Open Source be Secure by Design? | Æva Black | 34m |
Argues that the Cyber Resilience Act creates a new legal role for projects to offer voluntary security attestation so manufacturers can reduce due diligence… | ||
| Does FOSS Buy Sovereignty? Participation vs. Ownership | Mirko Boehm | 31m |
Argument: free and open source is necessary but not sufficient for digital sovereignty; sovereignty requires choice, adaptability, and influence exercised… | ||
| Open Source in Local Governments: Lessons from across the EU | Nicholas Gates | 27m |
Five EU case studies show concrete outcomes: an international foundation revives and governs Consul Democracy after political turnover, Digitransit builds on… | ||
| 2.5 Years of STA Bug Resilience: how we helped a lot of FOSS | Jan Lehnardt | 33m |
Neighbourhoodie (STA partner) reports concrete wins: engagements run as 40–80 person‑days each, systemd-resolved test coverage rises from 3% → 65% uncovering… | ||
| Building the Open Alternative: DPGs for Digital Sovereignty | Andy Piper | 31m |
Digital Public Goods can give institutions agency by combining open standards, certification and real deployments Mastodon enters the DPG registry (certified… | ||
| How the city of Munich measures digital sovereignty | Jutta Kreyss | 26m |
Munich creates a practical, reproducible metric that scores software sovereignty with seven yes/no questions derived from digitalsovereignty.net and Fraunhofer… | ||
| From Tires to Code: Building Michelin's OSPO | Florent Zara, Julien Millau | 29m |
Michelin launches a six-person OSPO in March 2024, uses GitLab internally, an internal artifactory for SBOM and scans, and a GitHub app to track public… | ||
| Is InnerSource Commons good for open source? | Benjamin Nickolls, Andrew Nesbitt | 27m |
Using ecosyste.ms data (14M packages, ~280M repos, 25B dependencies) the team maps 108 publicly listed InnerSource Commons organizations to GitHub, builds a… | ||
| A Frictionless Inner Source Journey | Wolfgang Gehring | 28m |
Company standardizes on GitHub and GitLab, runs an InnerSource discovery portal now on GitHub Enterprise Cloud, and measures contribution health by counting… | ||
| Getting Real with the Supply Chain: From SBOM Data to Action | Max Mehl, Cornelius Schumacher | 30m |
Deutsche Bahn turns SBOMs into action by centralizing generation, storage and analysis: an SBOM inventory (85,000 records now, aiming for ~150,000 and ~500,000… | ||
| Saxony in Action: Supporting a Lasting FOSS Foundation | Dr. Daniel Gerber | 29m |
Saxony funds the FOCIS project so ALASCA moves from volunteer group to staffed foundation, hired employees and stable governance, onboarding seven projects via… | ||
| Real accessibility: an imperfect, honest journey | Leia Ruffini, Juan Ruitiña | 30m |
A five‑year accessibility guild grows into a concrete practice: an external + internal audit after the EU Accessibility Act, published Ubuntu and web guides… | ||
| Balancing the Supply Chain Act | Sarah Hoffmann, Cornelius Schumacher, Sven Erik Jeroschewski, Melanie Wollnik, Tim Schmetzer | 38m |
Companies and communities clash on concrete expectations: legal regimes like the Cyber Resilience Act add security obligations that most projects must meet… | ||
| Building and scaling Hare's community governance | Drew DeVault | 29m |
Project starts secret in December 2019 and grows to 11 co‑maintainers and 100+ contributors using an explicit BDFL role, a maintainers file modeled on Linux… | ||
| FOSS behind the scenes - the center stage is not enough | Jan Ainali | 27m |
Claim: relying on proprietary services creates lock-in, exclusion and operational risk. Examples: design files in Figma, meetings on Zoom, chat on Slack… | ||
| Lessons from 10+ Years of Certifying Open Source Hardware | Michael Weinberg | 26m |
The Open Source Hardware Association runs a certification that verifies compliance with the community definition and today lists 3,000+ certified items from… | ||
| Navigating engineering-focused environments | Eriol Fox, Miguel Divo, Glòria Langreo, David Edler | 40m |
Open source teams embed UX by treating design as part of the code workflow: using GitHub issues and PRs for design QA, keeping design feedback in the same… | ||
| Plan to fork (So you don't have to fork) | Rich Bowen | 29m |
Writing a detailed plan to fork acts as a disaster recovery checklist: enumerate triggers (license change, vendor gravity, stalled maintainers), count how many… | ||
| Why Open Standards Power Compliance | Madalin Neag | 26m |
Linux Foundation data: 1,300+ projects, 4M developers trained, 89M lines of code added weekly, and an ROI example where $3.9B invested yields $23.2B benefits… | ||
| Keeping the flame alive: storytelling for open source | Nicole Weber | 27m |
Argues that storytelling plus brand design stops open source from feeling generic by using a concrete framework: Mission, Mantras, Manifestations; extracts… | ||
| Fair Share Cost Tokens | Gregor "Little Detritus" Bransky | 28m |
The Cyber Resilience Act motivates a system where no blockchain cryptographic tokens let manufacturers attest they paid their share and open source stewards… | ||
| Why Has Hardware Infrastructure Diverged From Open Software? | Tara Tarakiyee | 26m |
Argues that hardware stays closed because of unavoidable capital and institutional gaps: EDA licenses cost €100K–€1M per seat, top EDA vendors hold ~74% market… | ||
| How Open Collective moved from a for-profit to a non-profit | Shannon Wray | 30m |
Investors lose control and the platform moves into a community legal home, now a 501(c)(6) membership nonprofit after a negotiation that trades brand and some… | ||
| The Power of Dedicated Security Engineers vs. Volunteers | Miaolai Zhou | 19m |
AWS commits over $10M in 2022 and funding converts volunteers into full‑time security engineers who deliver concrete results: PyPI becomes a CVE numbering… | ||
| FLOSS Sustainability: Lessons from a Funding Crisis | Nil Homedes | 29m |
Decidim faces a 2022 cash shock that creates a €50k shortfall and triggers a Sustainability Plan to diversify income. The plan builds a funder database… | ||
| Curating Power: FOSS in the Service of National Interests | Cassie Jiun Seo | 25m |
Research traces governments assembling and exporting curated open stacks—India Stack, an emerging “Deutschland Stack,” DHIS2 deployed via PEPFAR—and shows… | ||
| ORT Server: An open source platform to automate CRA checks | Sebastian Schuberth, Martin Nonnenmacher | 30m |
ORT Server builds on OSS Review Toolkit to automate CRA checks with a UI and REST API, Kubernetes scaling, Keycloak OIDC for access control, and plugin-driven… | ||
| AI-Generated Code: Legal Risks and How to Reduce Them | Andreas Kotulla | 29m |
AI outputs often reproduce licensed source code rather than inventing it, with GitHub Copilot reproduces LGPL snippets and examples showing exact Quake 3 and… | ||
| How open source companies win | Emily Omier | 27m |
Argues that an open source project is often the company’s primary marketing channel and can be a loss leader that drives paid product adoption, cites five… | ||
| Beyond the license: measuring real openness in open source | Jos Poortvliet | 32m |
Nextcloud positions an on‑premise Microsoft 365 replacement used by governments and rolled out 100,000 sovereign digital workplaces per month last year… | ||
| Identifying and Addressing Usability Vulnerabilities | Elio Qoshi, Anxhela Maloku (Angie) | 28m |
Defines a “usability vulnerability” as a design flaw that predictably causes unsafe actions and presents a reproducible heuristic framework with three… | ||
| Success Stories in Open Source: Security Audits with OSTIF | Amir Montazery | 30m |
OSTIF presents a repeatable audit pipeline that refines independent code review for open source, running 12 CNCF audits in 2025 and a decade of work. Audits… | ||
| Shifting Left on Human Rights? | Daniel Appelquist | 05m |
W3C embeds human-rights checks into its standards pipeline by routing specs through specialist review groups for accessibility, internationalization, privacy… | ||
| Connecting Open Source Projects with Public Institutions | Oliver Drotbohm | 05m |
Proposes creating formal channels so open source projects and public institutions share roadmaps and bug reports, run joint code reviews, and announce who uses… | ||
| Training-as-Code: Scaling Open Source Literacy | Florent Zara | 06m |
Eclipse OSILK frames training as code: source AsciiDoc files with AsciiDoc modular includes and variables so teams swap in org-specific modules without… | ||
| Using content from Wikidata in your apps | Jan Ainali | 05m |
Wikidata is CC0 licensed and positioned as a semantic hub with over 130 million items described by 13,000 properties and roughly 1.5 billion facts… | ||
| The next xz attack | Daphne Preston-Kendal | 06m |
An attack between 2021 and 2024 injects a binary into xz via the build pipeline so the compromised xz userland can subvert SSH worldwide, with the campaign… | ||
| The OpenStreetMap Community | Jochen Topf | 32m |
OpenStreetMap is a 20‑year, volunteer‑led global geo‑database used by Facebook, Apple, DHL and the UN, not just a map but a platform with editors, renderers… | ||
| Docs, Demos, and Mentors: Growing Open Source | Mustapha Rufai | 23m |
Explains a concrete playbook: Docs as onboarding engines that anticipate failures, Demos via GitHub Codespaces and offline Docker examples, and scalable… | ||
| A fork load of maintenance - forking a key dependency | Tom Sadler, Joel Keers | 31m |
The BBC maintains a production fork of dash.js for BBC DVB‑DASH to support broadcaster extensions on web and connected TV, accepting a high maintenance cost… | ||
| We need a European Sovereign Tech Fund! | Felix Reda, Nicholas Gates | 29m |
A feasibility study recommends public mission funding of €350 million in the 2028–2034 EU budget, proposes a hybrid legal vehicle EDIC (European digital… | ||
| Lessons from Prometheus's First Design Mentorship | Victoria Nduka | 32m |
A developer-first project runs a 3-month UX research mentorship through LFX, using survey + interviews, weekly syncs and a public schedule, guided by the… | ||
| Narrative Infrastructure: Storytelling to Grow Open Source | Zainab Daodu | 32m |
Claim: turning storytelling into narrative infrastructure (WriteTech Hub applied this across projects including Jenkins Wikimedia and Mautic) makes projects go… | ||
| Let’s tackle Openwashing! | Johannes Näder | 25m |
FSFE defines open washing as open washing = proprietary software presented as free and backs that with a community survey, a typology of methods, and concrete… | ||
| Best practices and (very) small projects | Jan Dittrich | 24m |
Most popular open source packages show one-maintainer majority — Josh Bracha’s sample of 13,000 repos has single-collaborator projects nearly as many as all… | ||
| Educating the next generation of open source contributors | Ruth Ikegah, Dawn M Foster, Peculiar C. Umeh, Stephen R Walli | 37m |
Chaos project runs an education program that launches structured courses and office hours to onboard newcomers, with 27 courses launched January 2025 and a… | ||
| Bridging the Gap: Encouraging African Talent to Open Source | Seyi Kuforiji | 24m |
Contributed to the Git project (modernizing its unit testing framework), Outreachy internship on Git, a bioinformatics tool and a Linux 3D graphics backbone… | ||
| nothing matches | ||