I’ve been at my first ever FOSDEM conference - it’s a biiiig conference dedicated to Free and Open Source technology and culture located in Brussels, Belgium. It was such a cool experience, and finally - a whole month after I got home - my blogpost is ready. Here’s my impressions and notes on some of the talks (out of a 1000+ lol) I managed to see!

Image of Espruino-stand taken by Daniel (celsiuss.net/ - is it up yet?👀)

There was a ton of talks and stands to see, and of course I did the newbie mistake of trying to reach every room possible before it filled up. I ended up only seeing like three of the talks I wanted to see on the first day which was a bit dissapointing.

But I learned from my mistake on Saturday and Sunday went much better! This may be because I spent most of the Sunday in the Education-room hehe.

Well, here’s some notes I took while watching some of my favorite talks!

The talks

Parula - Presenting the new email client

Parula is basically a new email, calendar and chat app all-in-one, which is an attempt to bring fresh air into the email ecosystem.

It was a cool talk, mentioning how around 80% of the email-ecosystem in corporations is dominated by Microsoft.

Basically what Parula is doing is fully integrating mail, chat, video conference, calendar and files into on app, where you can seamlessly tranfer from, for example, an email sent from a colleague over to the same person in the Chat og Meet interface.

Otherwise, stuff like JMAP and a search-function for virtual folders are implemented, and they’re also going to implemente a rule-system for the emails.

I might try it out some time, haven’t decided yet, but it looked promising! Click here to check it out yourself.

Public Values and FOSS for education

Geert-Jan and Raoul talked about the problems and risks of public values in tools used in the education sector. They talked specifically about three categories: profiling and targeting of ads and service-personalization (privacy risk), behaviourprediction (risk for democracy and sovereignty), and personal/organizational/social lock-ins.

To move away from BigTech programs within the education sector we need to solve how for example adaptive learning-programs, which are open, is getting privatized and sold back to schools, as well teachers habits within technology.

Geert-Jan and Raoul believes that you should start at the school level too bascially “fix” the Internet. They’ve begun finding ways to do this in the Netherlands now, and are trying to start pilots in different schools where there should only be used an open source education stack.

An open source education stack could look something like this:

They’re currently trying to bring more countries in the EU in on this, and are already talking with Denmark about starting a similar pilotprogram there aswell.

After the talk I talked with Raoul about how this could be done in for example Norway as there’s a difference in how the school-system is set up there compared to the Netherlands. In the Netherlands, if I understood correctly, schools can be started by anyone and they’re not as connected to what the municipality they’re within is using already for their technology. Raoul meant that it should be easier in the norwegian education system to implement this just because of this, as well as the connection with a higher education organ.

This is something I would love to happen, and I might go back to school and do my master thesis about this.

A Free Software App Store for iOS: the App Fair Project’s perspective on the DMA

Appfair is a universal, free and open-source app marketplace.

The App Fair process is as follows:

1. Developers send in the source code
2. The source code is being built, scanned, and distributed
3. Then it gets reviewed, maintained, and translated by their own team
4. Afterwards App Fair will be the place to browse, review, etc. apps

So why use App Fair? Well, there’s no fees or registration, no terms and conditions, no Apple/Google account needed, automated distribution through multiple channels, assistance with translations and accessibility compliance, and trustworthiness seal of approval.

Making an app that distributes other apps is almost impossible on an iPhone, without jailbreaking or tethered workarounds. Additionally there’s no published APIs for installing or updating apps. Until the DMA (Digital Markets App) came, which is basically about creating a fair and better competition in digital markets.

The current barriers to a free software App Store is:

• 1M euro letter of credit for marketplace entitlement
• Inability to inspect encrypted app delivery
• Mandatory analytics: App install/uninstall/usage tracked by Apple
• Arbitrary delays for app review prevents timely security patches
• Remote kill switch: Opaque and unreviewable

A note on security obections: “Nothing is more insecure than a monoculture”

• A single centralized authority risks disruption or coercion
• Decision-making is opaqye and un-reviewable
• Invites pressure
• Examples:
  • October 10, 2019: Apple removes the HKmap.live maps app and the Quartz news app during the Hong Kong democracy protests.
  • September 17, 2021: Apple removes Alexei Navalny’s Smart Voting app the week before Russian parliamentary elections at the behest of Kremlin.
  • April 19, 2024: Apple pulls WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, and Threads from App Store in China following order

Some of the other talks I managed to see that were cool

• My Nix-Powered Homelab - Might have to refactor my servers to use Nix now lol. Maybe I should just run it bare-metal??
• Auditing Web Trackers with the EDPB’s Open-Source Website Compliance Tool - Given the European regulations which are imposing strict rules on the collection and use of data via cookies and other trackers on websites, it was cool to see someone actually developing “the perfect auditing tool”.
• FOLL-E: open source educational tool to stimulate logical reasoning - Nice tool to stimulate the logical reasoning skills of children
• Free Software Teaching Materials - Interesting to see ways to could teach students more about the four freedoms

Hopefully this can become a tradition?

As we were five guru’s from friByte travelling together there, plus meeting a previous friByter from Spain there, I hope this can become a tradition of sorts as it was such a fun weekend!

Rolf and I even went for a quick jog on the Monday to get some final sightseeing in as well. I posted some of the photos in the gallery entry for Brussels if you want to see.

Until next time FOSDEM!

Small text about thanking Rolf for the idea of writing a post about FOSDEM ;) Check his post out aswell!