foss-north 2026
2026-04-27..2026-04-28
Gothenburg, Sweden
[foss-north 2017, foss-north 2018, foss-north 2019, foss-north 2020, foss-north 2020 take ii, foss-north 2021, foss-north 2022, foss-north 2023, foss-north 2024, foss-north 2025, foss-north 2026]
who it's for
open source maintainers, devops engineers, security engineers, site reliability engineers, legal and compliance professionals, embedded systems developers, public sector IT managers
topics
license compliance basics; SBOM state and practice; signing distribution artifacts; Helm YAML pitfalls; pair-programming app in Rust; WebRTC screencast tuning; PostgreSQL binary backups and PITR; LLM observability with OpenTelemetry; digital sovereignty strategies; distributed CI with Radicle; end-to-end encrypted collaboration
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Interoperability goes to court: a case for Software Freedom | Lucas Lasota | 46m |
EU campaign pushes device neutrality so phones must allow true app installs and hardware API access; Free Software Foundation Europe files nine reports, joins… | ||
| Running a FOSS associative ISP | Evilham | 38m |
Association Exo runs a not‑for‑profit ISP founded 2010 that is a registered operator, a RIPE member and peers at CATNIX, serving 109 members with radio mesh… | ||
| The thin line between code and configuration (YAML/Helm rant) | Felicitas Pankalla | 09m |
Argues that Helm templates are brittle for large systems, showing name-cohesion bugs that only fail minutes after deploy and calling out Helm templates cause… | ||
| Building a pair-programming app in public with Rust | Costa Alexoglou | 33m |
An open‑source pair‑programming app called hope is built in Rust with a Go backend, Redis pub/sub, Tauri/iced/wgpu native UI and screen_capture_kit_rs for… | ||
| Digital disruption in the public transport sector through FOSS community engagement | Glenn Eriksson | 30m |
A public transport agency born-digital in 2016–17 replaces slow vendor procurement by assembling open planner and other open‑source components and ships a… | ||
| Modern Email | Jeremiah Foster | 51m |
Argues that running mail is practical today using modern stacks: JMAP replaces IMAP/SMTP with HTTP for JMAP fast mobile-friendly sync and single auth; delivery… | ||
| Fuzzy Logic Evaluation | Simon Nielsen Knights | 08m |
Argues that fuzzy logic replaces brittle if/behavior-tree rules by mapping environment signals (health, crowding, comfort, temperature) to 0–1 via a response… | ||
| Fully Automated Luxury Standups | John Graham | 08m |
Company uses an IRC standup bot that tracks up to about 15 participants, auto-pings attendees, records ordered updates and attempts a GitLab wiki push by… | ||
| Dirty Tricks: Using nginx and Lua to thwart bots and skript kiddies | Eirik Øverby | 41m |
Implements a working Telnet CAPTCHA: an nginx stream module TCP proxy plus Lua generates simple math challenges, tracks attempts, allows two concurrent virtual… | ||
| Running an open source project like a professional | Magnus Glantz | 55m |
Explains a practical checklist for launching and sustaining an open source project: choose a license from FSF/OSI lists, map users and adjacent projects, set… | ||
| PostgreSQL Don'ts and Dos | Magnus Hagander | 59m |
If backups take 48 hours with pg_dump expect a 5–6 day restore; switch to binary backups like pg_basebackup and a PITR-capable tool such as pg_backrest… | ||
| Digital sovereignty through open source – Europe's strategic opportunity | Johan Linåker | 31m |
Europe controls 15% of the cloud market while US firms hold about 70%, and national responses range from France moving desktops to Linux to Germany building a… | ||
| What did AI just do? Making LLMs Observable with OpenTelemetry | Ishan Jain | 18m |
Shows how OpenTelemetry is used to capture full LLM and agent traces so every API call, tool invocation and DB write is recorded with prompts and responses… | ||
| License Compliance 101 | Henrik Sandklef | 31m |
Licenses impose permissions and conditions that trigger on how code is combined and distributed, so projects must identify all dependencies including… | ||
| From Inventory to Inspection: What the CRA Means for OSPO Maturity | Hans Bak | 24m |
EU CRA forces continuous, build-time inventories and verifiable controls so organizations move from one-off SBOM snapshots to continuous observability across… | ||
| Open source tools for the power sector | Gry M. Tveten | 35m |
Combines an open hydrology and orchestration stack with market modelling by proposing to merge Shift (hydrology, geo wiring, orchestration, C++ core with… | ||
| FOSS Forms: LiberaForms | Evilham | 08m |
LiberaForms ships an end-to-end encryption workflow built with OpenPGP.js where users generate keys, are forced to back them up, and the server stores only… | ||
| Open by Choice, Sovereign by Design | Emiel Brok | 53m |
A concise, objective method maps eight sovereignty objectives to five levels using the EU Cloud Sovereignty framework and a 32-question self-assessment that… | ||
| Litterbox: Somewhat Isolated Development Environments | Gerhard de Clercq | 27m |
Litterbox provides somewhat isolated development environments by running full editors and tools inside unprivileged containers (Podman) while keeping SSH keys… | ||
| The Duke and the Beastie - Improving OpenJDK support for FreeBSD | Harald Eilertsen | 49m |
One and a half years of sponsored work produces a production-grade OpenJDK port for FreeBSD maintained by a three-person team, with the FreeBSD ports tree now… | ||
| Building Open Source Embedded UIs with Qt & Slint | Alexandra Betouni | 36m |
Built a working smartwatch UI demo implemented in Rust+Slint then reproduced in C++/Slint and in Qt QML; visually the UIs match. Measured build and runtime… | ||
| CryptPad: End to End encrypted collaboration can be easy to use | Ludovic Dubost | 30m |
One-click document creation with no account, real time collaborative docs slides images a drive calendar and encrypted forms that the server cannot read, plus… | ||
| The Once and Future COBOL | James Lowden | 24m |
GCC now has a direct-to-object compiler front end for COBOL that targets the ISO definition and produces GCC generic trees for code generation, moving beyond… | ||
| SBOM today: What is the state of SBOMs? | Olle E. Johansson | 26m |
Log4j prompts the push for SBOMs and the Cyber Resilience Act mandates long term product records, yet automation and tooling remain immature: many teams still… | ||
| Hybrid MFA: Balancing On‑Premise Control and Cloud Integration with privacyIDEA | Jelina Unger | 19m |
privacyIDEA is an on‑premise MFA system extended to a hybrid setup that centralizes tokens and policies while integrating cloud IdPs. Implementation details… | ||
| Talking tech to legal: part 2 | Jimmy Ahlberg, Henrik Sandklef | 27m |
Explains how legal teams translate engineering terms into enforceable rules, using examples like 72,000 components Ericsson ingests per year, debates over… | ||
| Building Open Source and living from it without selling your soul | Ludovic Dubost | 55m |
A self-funded company builds two open-source products, XWiki (8,000 installations, 500 clients) and CryptPad (about 10% of engineering effort), sustaining… | ||
| A shoutout for physical meetups | Louis Tim Larsen | 08m |
Physical meetups increase retention and solve hands-on problems that AI often mishandles — a cited example shows ChatGPT-4 giving incorrect instructions for… | ||
| Open Source AI reality | Daniel Stenberg | 59m |
Open source projects see a shift from noisy hallucinations in 2025 to high-volume, high-quality reports in 2026: report rate doubled in 2025 and doubled again… | ||
| Using FOSS to Protect Embedded Systems Data in Transit | Bassem Nomany | 50m |
Argues security is a marathon: build a foundation from day one and iterate. Recommends concrete controls: network zoning (keep startups to two to four zones… | ||
| Multi-Cloud Without the Myth: What Actually Works in Practice | Pablo del Arco Ortiz | 20m |
OpenNebula demonstrates a working federation: a pilot (Victora) ties five providers across eight countries into 10 availability zones managed by a single front… | ||
| Distributed CI with Radicle and Ambient | Lars Wirzenius | 45m |
Explains a distributed CI stack built on Radicle CI with an adapter model (JSON stdin/out over a Unix domain socket to a CI broker), a local-first engine… | ||
| Signing distribution artifacts with Signstar | David Runge | 32m |
Arch Linux moves package and repo signing into a central service called Signstar that uses OpenPGP, Rust code, and HSM backends (initially netHSM then pivot to… | ||
| nothing matches | ||