SFSCON 2024
as the organisers put it
The South Tyrol Free Software Conference, SFSCON, is one of Europe’s most established annual conferences on Free Software. SFSCON promotes the use of Free Software in IT infrastructures as a tool to achieve greater innovation and competitiveness in the region. Here decision-makers and developers meet, learn and get inspired.
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| How to build a website for the IndieWeb | Giacomo Debidda | 16m |
Argues that owning a domain and publishing first gives portable identity and content, shows a working IndieAuth flow where the client ID is the app URL (no… | ||
| about: Fediverse | Tobias Diekershoff | 19m |
A decentralized social network based on ActivityPub that connects about 14 million accounts across roughly 20,000 community-run servers, mostly… | ||
| Building a no-drama community | benny Vasquez | 36m |
Built several user communities for Liquid Web, cpanel, Chef and alma Linux, using Twitter, video calls and one-on-one DMs to recruit and repair trust. Core… | ||
| ARM Linux Laptops for Developers Status Report | Stefan Schmidt | 15m |
ARM laptops now appear in >100 variants and roughly 30+ distinct models but installation requires bring your own install artifacts: a custom kernel, a… | ||
| Optimizing Cloud Compute Resources with Spare Cores | Gergely Daroczi | 17m |
Open source Spare Cores tracks over 2,000 server types and runs benchmarks that produced more than 800,000 scores, updates prices across 300+ availability… | ||
| Let’s spark children’s interest in coding | Matthias Kirschner | 15m |
Organizes a months‑long teen coding contest called youth hacking for freedom where entries must be released under free software licenses, include online… | ||
| State of Microsoft Windows Refund (2024) | Valerio Bozzolan | 15m |
Claims that consumers can get refunds for unused Windows OEM licenses by documenting the preinstalled license screen, deleting Windows, and forcing the… | ||
| Decentralized Search Over Decentralized Storage | Alexey Volkov | 10m |
A lightweight decentralized storage called onmydis runs on home PCs, single board computers and even router firmware and connects out to a public Gateway that… | ||
| IT Security – Don’t let Open Source Software become the next menace | Giancarlo Calzetta | 18m |
Open source ecosystems accumulate critical, unmaintained components that become attack surfaces: Log4Shell (log4j) rated 10/10 triggers mass scans on Dec 10… | ||
| Implementing digital examinations in free software systems | Juha Erkkilä | 15m |
Debian‑based school OS boots from USB now for secure exams but national exams have been fully digital for five years and the plan is to move from USB to a… | ||
| Tag manager | Sandro Antonucci | 13m |
Open source tag manager built to remotely control cookie banners and scripts with script templating across sites, October CMS backend, Cookie Consent for… | ||
| How to set up an Open Source Program Office? Get insights and use cases from the OSPO Alliance | Valentina Del | 15m |
Describes a practical OSPO playbook: a four-step Good Governance Initiative (define goals, turn goals into canonical activities, add KPI scorecards, iterate)… | ||
| Cyber Risk Management: let’s try to manage it with open source and free software | Specchierla | 15m |
Argues that open source GRC and risk tools can replace Excel and expensive suites by centralizing policies, assets, controls, evidence and schedules, and by… | ||
| MoodleXR: A Next-Generation Open-Source Platform for Immersive Learning | Luca Bagna | 15m |
A feasibility study proposes turning Moodle into an immersive platform that streams VR/AR through a browser using WebXR streaming built with Blender Unity… | ||
| Using software tools and AI to audit e-commerce food regulations | Davide Montesin | 15m |
Prototype scrapes product pages, runs automated tests and applies NLP to extract ingredient lists, check allergen styling (uppercase/bold) and detect missing… | ||
| Free your Games | Marco Amato | 15m |
A free-software game platform built with Lante (formerly Mest) becomes a multiplayer server called AES emulation system launched during the pandemic with mini… | ||
| Containerization and micro-services in real life change security and vulnerability management | Carlo fola, Carl fola | 15m |
Microservices and containers force security to change: ephemeral containers make periodic scans useless so teams adopt continuous runtime monitoring, enforce… | ||
| Let’s share our love for Free Software | Ana Galan | 14m |
A campaign called I love Free Software Day promotes saying thank you to free software projects via #ILoveFS, events across Europe (Bergamo, Barcelona, Berlin… | ||
| LibreOffice as JavaScript idiomatic WebWidget + Library | Moritz Duge | 14m |
Runs a full LibreOffice build inside the browser via WebAssembly and a zjs wrapper that exposes the UNO API to normal JavaScript; the office process lives in a… | ||
| Designing open source tools for Citizen Coders | Luca Rainone | 16m |
Survey work finds about 14% nonprofessional contributors in a developer community and Stack Overflow shows a similar ~15% figure, and 33% of developers report… | ||
| Demystifying JWTs | Dominika Bobik | 11m |
Explains what a JWT actually contains (header, payload, signature), how signatures are created and verified by hashing header+payload and comparing with an… | ||
| Building the Public Interest Desktop | Tobias Bernard, Sonny Piers | 16m |
Gnome receives a $1M budget and hires 28 contractors to fund maintenance work via the Sovereign Tech Fund; outcomes include keyring rewritten in Rust… | ||
| Web Accessibility is actually well-forgotten old | Sofia Etingof, Juri Solovjov | 16m |
Claims that most sites fail accessibility standards with tangible numbers: ~96% of sites show WCAG issues, 60% of images lack alt text, 45% of Dutch iOS users… | ||
| Nurturing OpenJDK distribution: Eclipse Temurin Success History and plan | Grimstad, Delgado | 15m |
Eclipse Temurin runs as a vendor-neutral OpenJDK distribution with 500 million downloads, built from public GitHub CI scripts that produce reproducible builds… | ||
| Tackling Openwashers, Freeloaders and Cuckoos | Johannes Näder | 15m |
Defines open washing as claiming to be free software while shipping proprietary parts and shows concrete fixes: a password manager using two licenses where one… | ||
| Sync Your Tunes, Sync Your Screen: Introducing SyncWall | Giovanni Enrico Loni | 15m |
An app called SyncWall generates live desktop wallpapers from the currently playing Spotify track, polling the Spotify API every second and using Spotify API +… | ||
| Jakarta EE: Why and how to get involved in Open Source Software? | Tanja Obradovic | 15m |
Jakarta EE continues Java EE under the Eclipse Foundation with concrete releases: Jakarta EE 9.1 is out and Jakarta EE 10 introduces a new Jakarta Core Profile… | ||
| Fostering Innovation in IT Businesses through Open Source Software Involvement | Daniele Gobbetti | 15m |
Argues that small and medium IT firms gain measurable innovation by letting staff review PRs and join project discussions rather than trying to fund whole… | ||
| What’s New in Notifications | Julian Sparber | 16m |
Aims to bring Linux notifications up to par with Android/iOS by standardizing features through the portal API, making notifications reliably tied to an app… | ||
| Why free backup software matters | Andreas Rogge | 16m |
Argues that using free backup like baros cuts real risks: vendor discontinuation, sudden pricing or licensing shifts, export or regulatory blocks, and supply… | ||
| A Journey of Contribution and Collaboration in Open Source | Ivar Grimstad | 16m |
Eclipse Foundation hosts 400+ projects including Jakarta and Eclipse Che and provides governance, CI and supply-chain security services so projects can meet… | ||
| From Personalized to Programmed | Thomas Aichner | 15m |
Explains concrete failures when AI is grafted onto mass customization: a passport-photo rejection that flags open eyes as closed, Google suggesting 1/8 cup… | ||
| Ansible | Marco Lampis | 16m |
Ansible claims to automate developer environment and server setup so one command reproduces a machine instead of manual steps, demonstrated by a local run that… | ||
| What the open source community means to me | Florian Effenberger | 15m |
Personal account of a 20 year journey from user to contributor centered on OpenOffice.org→LibreOffice and setting up the Document Foundation, claiming open… | ||
| Impact & Innovation: The Crucial Role of OSPOs in Shaping a More Sustainable Capitalism | Pampaloni | 17m |
Market concentration rises sharply over a generation with the tech top ten now representing 30% of the S&P and those firms grew 58% last year, prompting… | ||
| Monolith Splitter | Michal Skipala, Bruno Rossi | 16m |
Tool ingests execution traces and optional git lock files and outputs class clusters; backend runs Java 21 Spring Boot 3.2 with Postgres and a TypeScript React… | ||
| NGI: No more EU funding for Free Software?! | Alexander Sander | 15m |
NGI funding earmarked for community free software loses a €27 million line in a leaked Horizon Europe work program and the commission reallocates it to AI… | ||
| AI Law & Ethics: developing responsible AI systems | Francesco Vadori, Federico Sartore | 17m |
Argues that ethics can be measured with data and must be engineered into systems through legal and technical work rather than rhetoric, citing the EU… | ||
| How to start contributing and still have fun | Juri Solojov | 12m |
Work on projects you actually use, add a missing feature or hardware support, and ship it with tests so CI and GitHub checks pass; aim for small wins like… | ||
| Proxmox Backup Server: Backup for your Datacenter | Christian Ebner | 16m |
Proxmox Backup Server stores backups as content-addressable storage of millions of cryptographic-hashed chunks, enabling efficient deduplication and fast… | ||
| The FSFE Italy Project from Understanding to Testing | Marta Andreoli | 15m |
FSFE Italy project starts in 2022 under NCH Park coordination and uses design thinking with interviews, immersion, observation to map volunteers and… | ||
| The ZOOM project: final results and future outlooks | Elisa Morganti | 16m |
Project delivers a legal-business licensing framework, a toolkit and licensing framework plus a Business Model Innovation matrix built from literature… | ||
| AI Tools for Jakarta EE | Gaurav Gupta | 15m |
Live demo builds a working conference app using Par Starter plus Jedi AI assistant for Apache NetBeans IDE, scaffolding ER diagrams and UI then exporting… | ||
| Approaches to Object Detection: Edge-Based and AI-Based | Giovanni Giannotta, Orneda Lecini | 14m |
Case study detects pests on blue paper using ImageJ + MorphoJ with size and circularity thresholds; raising minimum area removes noise but uneven lighting and… | ||
| The Innovation Paradox | Andrea Solimene | 16m |
Argues that the core problem is the Innovation Paradox: companies must balance stability and change, efficiency and creativity, competition and collaboration… | ||
| Lessons from the EU’s Next Generation Internet Initiatives | Lina Ceballos, Gabriel Ku Wei Bin | 14m |
European Commission’s Next Generation Internet mobilizes 140 million EUR and funds 1,000+ projects; Free Software Foundation Europe audits about 500 projects… | ||
| The Crucial Role of Openness in Modern Software Development | Civardi, Tasarz-Sochacka | 16m |
Argues that openness—concrete use of Jakarta EE and MicroProfile—delivers measurable benefits: standardized security practices and container-based configs cut… | ||
| Raspberry Pi and Node-RED: Open Source Tools for Local Automation and Industrial IoT applications | Matia pirani | 16m |
Demonstrates that Raspberry Pi + Node-RED can handle small-to-medium industrial tasks not as PLC replacements but as low-cost, open source bridges to Modbus… | ||
| Hacking your (electric) car: the importance of Open Data | Luca Bonissi | 16m |
Argues that car telematics belong to the owner and shows how to extract and decode them: scan ECUs with an OBD2 USB or Bluetooth adapter, dump all PIDs… | ||
| (re)classifying FOSS licenses | Henrik Sandklef | 15m |
Proof-of-concept license reclassifier extends Herminé’s clause-and-trigger model to check compatibility between obligations rather than full-license matrices… | ||
| The SMART Box of AURA Project | Alberto Nicoletti | 16m |
A compact, solar-powered IoT box that embeds Grove environmental sensor and gas sensors (NOx, O3, CO2, CO) into urban green furniture, sending calibrated… | ||
| Sharing Connects People | Vittorio Iacovella | 15m |
ThinkOpen builds a virtual space at CHIMeC where researchers share not just data but processes and practices, converting messy spreadsheets into certified… | ||
| SPDXv3: Advancing Transparency in Software | Alexios Zavras | 16m |
SPDXv3 defines a graph-based data model and splits the spec into a minimal core plus subject-specific profiles (license, security, build, AI, safety… | ||
| ScrapeGraphAI | Marco Vinciguerra | 16m |
Open source ScrapeGraphAI builds scraping pipelines as node graphs and uses LLMs (OpenAI, Bedrock, Llama, Hugging Face) plus a Chromium loader to fetch… | ||
| 2025 scenario on OpenISA OpenPower Open Hardware computing | Roberto Innocenti | 16m |
Nonprofit volunteer group designs an OpenPOWER motherboard prototype using an NXP T2080 development chip for initial tests, relies on FPGA softcore builds and… | ||
| BASIC CORE South Tyrol | Edoardo Scepi | 17m |
Simplifies Italy’s National Core into a lightweight “Basic Core” for Bolzano by halving classes from 59 to 23, removing attributes duplicated in existing… | ||
| 25 Years of Copyleft Enforcement: The Road Ahead for Defending Software Rights | Bradley M. Kuhn | 17m |
Claims that GPL never auto-liberates code and that enforcement requires courts and constant vigilance, backed by concrete actions: OpenWrt founding (2003)… | ||
| Can Test Driven Development be speeded up with Generative AI? | Mock, Russo, Melegati | 16m |
Experiment uses ChatGPT API with GPT‑3.5 on Google Colab, 16 participants given 40 minutes to complete a TDD task using two interaction patterns and crafted… | ||
| Smart Werke Meran - Lorawan Use Cases | Stefan Mutschlechner | 17m |
City of Meran runs an open source LoRaWAN stack (CH stack) with gateways in 71 electrical cabinets, 4G modems and planned fiber, claiming battery life up to 10… | ||
| EO4MULTIHAZARDS Web Application | Mahtab Niknahad | 09m |
A web application and harmonized database that ingests three sources—EM‑DAT, EFFIS, BGS—using a scheduled CI/CD pipeline to retrieve, harmonize and load events… | ||
| Codeemoji – Making code more informative with emojis | Eduardo Guerra | 16m |
A plugin called CodeEmoji plugin for IntelliJ automatically annotates identifiers with emojis derived from static analyses and external sources, so a method… | ||
| Enabling global interoperability among smart devices is only possible through Open Source | Rico | 15m |
Claims that Open Harmony plus a compatible European distribution Ono create a truly global interoperable smart‑device stack, with concrete steps… | ||
| AI no-code for marketing | Alessandro Agnati | 16m |
Presents an experimental four-step method named AENA methodology that uses ChatGPT (OpenAI) to generate a full one-year marketing plan for a mock product… | ||
| 1, 2, 3, doc kit! | Marina Latini | 15m |
Dockit automates bootstrapping project documentation so teams stop handcrafting layouts and focus on content; it runs with DAPS + Dockit bootstrap and supports… | ||
| Adoption Determinants of Open Hardware Across Industries | Seckin Celik, Davide Serpico | 15m |
Systematic review plus analysis of GitHub repos shows open hardware adoption hinges on five measurable factors: relative advantage, compatibility, technical… | ||
| Accelerating territory’s development through Open Data | Luisa Marangon | 16m |
Regional open data platform Open Data Hub publishes weather, traffic, air-quality, mobility and flight feeds and logs 3 million+ requests, powers 500+… | ||
| Cyber Resilience Act, already too late to comply? | Alberto Pianon, Carlo Piana | 16m |
Law says software becomes regulated when it is monetized even as a single component and free open source must be openly shared to count as exempt so many… | ||
| MariaDB Vector: Why your AI data should be in an RDBMS | Kaj Arnö | 16m |
Argues that vectors belong inside a relational DB because your source, results and audit trail already live there and because storing vectors alongside rows… | ||
| DOOF- an Open Source Orchestration Framework for Decentralized Consent Management | Georgiana Bud | 15m |
DOOF is an open source consent orchestration that decouples content management from data transport and records Solidity smart contract on Alastria to make… | ||
| CRA & PLD Liability rules and Software Freedom | Alexander Sander | 15m |
European rules create a mandatory C-label on software tied to the Cyber Resilience Act, Product Liability Directive and a paused AI liability file, after about… | ||
| Opt out? Opt in? Opt green! Bringing Free Software To Eco-Consumers | Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss | 16m |
ICT emissions sit around 2–3% today and models project up to 30% by 2050; manufacturing accounts for roughly half of ICT energy use and the world produced… | ||
| Journeying through Data Spaces - New Path to Interoperability? | Petteri Kivimaki | 15m |
Nordic Institute for Interoperability Solutions outlines converting existing open source tools into a governed data space architecture and demonstrates… | ||
| On the ethical challenges raised by robots powered by AI | Fulvio Mastrogiovanni | 16m |
Compares an aerospace benchmark 0.0000‑something hourly fault rate to current robot control showing roughly 16% failure rate when picking objects, arguing that… | ||
| Apisense - Easily monitor and track your REST-API data quality | Aurelio Buonomo, Christian Zanotti | 12m |
A lightweight system that watches REST APIs for sensor data gaps and automatically runs checks built from templated definitions that expand into many test… | ||
| Open-source silicon chips | Luca Alloatti | 16m |
Argues that truly open-source chips require open PDKs and EDA stacks not just open RTL and shows concrete barriers: most foundries hide PDKs behind NDAs, three… | ||
| Open Access for Museum Collections and Research | Artemis Yagou | 15m |
Museums run a conscious open‑access push that digitizes tens of thousands of objects to enable research and public viewing while avoiding handling damage; core… | ||
| Let’s all get over the CRA! | Charles-H. Schulz | 16m |
European Cyber Resilience Act splits software into three tiers: Level 1 requires costly Common Criteria audits, Level 2 likely needs lighter third‑party checks… | ||
| AlmaLinux in brief | benny Vasquez | 16m |
Enterprise-grade CentOS replacement with 10 years of support, built from Red Hat sources and run by a nonprofit foundation that manages volunteers, SIGs and an… | ||
| Open Source in EU Policy | Jordan Maris | 18m |
EU lawmakers once ignored open source but now count it as a public good: €93 billion economic impact and 90% of software using OSS push regulators to act. A… | ||
| SFSCON24 - SFS Award 2024 | 05m | |
Local SFS award honors a city project that turns its yearly children’s roleplay festival miniet into a hands-on tech lab: a new media center teaches reuse… | ||
| SFSCON24 - European SFS Award 2024 | Matias kirna, Rafael Barbieri | 08m |
European SFS Award 2024 honors Braam Molar, credited as creator of VI improved or wom, a modal text editor started in 1991 that spreads across 15 operating… | ||
| Open Source Business as an Independent, Sustainable way to Fund Open Source | Emily Omier | 29m |
Argues that running a company around an open source project is one of the most sustainable funding routes, contrasting tip-jar donations (example: corporate… | ||
| Greetings from NOI | Vincent MOA | 05m |
NCH Park runs a free software lab that helps companies define an agile process, an AI strategy, build first prototypes and run usability testing, develop IoT… | ||
| Opening SFSCON 2024 | ulri STNA | 05m |
NTIC Park reports rapid expansion: 2,500 people work, study, and research on site daily after opening the new faculty of engineering of free University of b… | ||
| nothing matches | ||