FOSDEM 2026: Connecting Security and the Open-Source Community

On January 31 and February 1, the OpenSSL Corporation participated in FOSDEM 2026 in Brussels, Belgium, joining over 8,000 hackers and developers at the ULB Solbosch Campus for one of Europe’s most significant free and open-source software events.

This year’s FOSDEM featured 1,013 lectures across 65 devrooms, highlighting the event’s scale and diversity.

A small team from the OpenSSL Corporation attended the event in person, including Hana Andersen, Milan Brož, Daniela Kellnerová, and Tomáš Vávra.

Strengthening Ties with the Distributions Community

In addition to the main schedule, significant focus was placed on the Distributions Community, with meetings held at the Mitwit office and at CentOS Connect just prior to the conference.

These discussions focused heavily on its needs and future. Following that conversation, Jaroslav Reznik, a member of the Corporation Business Advisory Committee, brought together distributions representatives in Brussels for an open follow-up meeting. He was joined by Anton Arapov, Director of the OpenSSL Corporation, and Jon Ericson, Communities Manager of the OpenSSL Foundation, along with representatives from the Distributions group, including Red Hat, CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, Chainguard, SUSE, Canonical, and Microsoft, as well as several participants joining the meeting remotely.

From left to right: Clemens Lang (Foundation’s Business Advisory Committee/ Distributions, Red Hat), Tobias Heider (Canonical), Jaroslav Reznik (Corporation’s Business Advisory Committee/ Distributions, Red Hat), Brian Exelbierd (Microsoft), and Dmitry Belyavskiy (Corporation Technical Advisory Committee/ Distributions, Red Hat) are discussing matters during the meeting.

One of the key goals of this session was to define an actionable list of priorities for Distributions maintainers and engineers working on OS and Linux distros that include OpenSSL Projects.

This initiative reinforces the Distributions Community’s role as a partner in the development of the OpenSSL Library, ensuring that input from this community helps to prioritise the future technical roadmap. To support broad inclusion, a voting process is currently underway to finalise these priorities.

The meeting outcomes, including a poll, are being shared with the wider community, and members are encouraged to vote by Tuesday, February 17. This approach highlights how the Distributions Community works and what can be achieved when its members meet, whether in person or online. The intention is to continue these meetings regularly.

Reflections from the FOSDEM Event

Milan Brož shares his observations on the unique atmosphere of the event and the growing intersection of policy and open-source:

“FOSDEM is a huge community event. The maze of corridors at ULB University leading to the many devrooms is famous; if you didn’t get lost at FOSDEM, you weren’t really there. Brussels is unofficially called the capital of the European Union, and it was encouraging to see that EU institutions found a way to participate in FOSDEM as well. From the topics covering the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), it seems that institutions have finally started to understand open-source and its community. It is refreshing to see that open-source projects have become a common part of systems requiring the most stringent standards.”

Busy university spaces naturally encouraged conversation and spontaneous exchanges throughout the event.

Looking Ahead

We thank the organisers of FOSDEM for creating such a valuable platform for exchange and learning. We also thank everyone who stopped us in the crowd for a chat or met with us at the side events.

To learn more about the OpenSSL Corporation’s initiatives and upcoming events, visit our website. Explore the OpenSSL Projects: openssl-projects.org Get involved on: OpenSSL Communities Hub