I was lucky enough to be able to attend the Open Source Summit Europe 2025 in Amsterdam last week. The event was hosted by the Linux Foundation and covered all sorts of topics ranging from cloud and containerization to embedded systems and AI (I think it is mandatory to mention AI at least five times in every article now?). The next couple of posts will be my attempt at summarizing the experience and some of the stuff I learned.
My interests range more towards the Linux Kernel Development, embedded systems and source control topics, which is reflected in the talks and workshops I visited. I am sure the talks from the other domains were just as educative, and if you are intersted in that, you should consider going! Next year will be in Prague
Day One
I missed the opening keynote sessions thanks to the efficiency of the German public transport system. Luckily, I arrived just in time to listen to Daniel Stenbergs talk “giants, standing on the shoulders of”. Daniel is really a great public speaker (and a great writer too! As the title suggests, the talk was about how giants, i.e. big companies, are standing on the shoulders of small, often unpaid development teams or single develoeprs like Daniel himself, while often providing relatively sparse support to the projects they so heavily rely on. To add to this, costs to provide services like curl keep rising. In several ways this is caused by AI: either through people that use AI to generate (often wrong and misleading) bug reports and issues, or more directly through the high impact of webscraping on pages like curl.se. While I had heard of the general issue before through the latest episode of Binaergewitter, I was unaware of the scale of this and it was interesting to see this impact in a numerical way. Daniel reported that of the roughly 65 TB of bandwith curl.se serves each month, only 0.01% (!) are actual tarball downloads. Current proposed solutions like robots.txt are insufficient and a proper one is yet to be found.