11 MIN READ
Linux Foundation Europe | 22 January 2026
Late January is becoming one of the most important moments of the year for Europe’s open source ecosystem. With multiple conferences, workshops, policy summits, and community events happening back-to-back in Brussels, the region now celebrates a full EU Open Source Week.
From 26 January to 1 February 2026, developers, maintainers, policymakers, researchers, and organisations will gather to collaborate on the future of open digital infrastructure. At the center of this activity sits FOSDEM, with Linux Foundation Europe playing a major role throughout the week.
We have been heading to Brussels since 2023, and it’s been incredible to watch the community grow every year. (Curious about previous years? You can read more here: LF Europe at FOSDEM 2023, 2024 & 2025).
A Week-Long Look at Open Source in Europe
If you are planning your visit, start here:
- Check out this page that explains all events happening during 26 Jan – 1 Feb in Brussels (EU Open Source Week 2026).
- You will also find a growing ecosystem of community-run activities all around the city. Explore the FOSDEM 2026 Fringe events.
Together, these events make EU Open Source Week one of the richest opportunities for collaboration in the global open source calendar.
EU Open Source Policy Summit 2026
The 2026 EU Open Source Policy Summit will bring together public and private sector leaders to show how open source delivers Europe’s digital sovereignty across security, cloud, AI, standards, and industrial innovation. Linux Foundation Europe is a Gold Sponsor of the Summit, underscoring its commitment to advancing open, collaborative digital ecosystems in Europe.
Gabriele Columbro (LF Europe / FINOS) will give a keynote on Europe’s digital sovereignty and the strategic role of open ecosystems.
Paula Grzegorzewska (LF Europe) will participate in the panel “Building Alternatives – Cloud & AI”, which will examine how open source can support competitive European cloud and AI ecosystems, trusted infrastructure, and interoperability. She will be joined by Alexandra Geese, Member of the European Parliament (Greens/EFA); Thibaut Kleiner, Director at DG CONNECT, European Commission; Frank Karlitschek, CEO of Nextcloud; Ritesh Paiboina, CTO of Open Telekom Cloud at T-Systems International; and Frank Feldmann, Chief Strategy Officer at SUSE.
The panel will explore how regulation, procurement, and industrial policy can be aligned to foster European alternatives to dominant global platforms, while ensuring openness drives innovation, interoperability, trust, and strategic control over critical digital infrastructure. Learn more and register to join Europe’s open source policy conversation.
FOSDEM 2026
FOSDEM remains Europe’s largest free gathering for open source developers, offering packed devrooms, main tracks, lightning talks, and hallway conversations across every part of the open ecosystem.
This year, several Linux Foundation hosted and affiliated projects will have stands on-site, showcasing both global and European-led open source efforts across cloud, telco, hardware, energy, embedded systems, and security, including:
- AW-06 - Dronecode Foundation + The Zephyr Project
- AW-0 - RISC-V International
- H-13 - Xen Project
- K1-C-06 - OpenTofu & OpenBao
- K2-A-02 - Cloud Native Computing Foundation + OpenInfra Foundation + TODO Group
- K2-A-03 - Linux Foundation Europe + Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF)
- K2-A-15 - OpenAgri Software Services - democratising digital agriculture
We are also highlighting European-born initiatives and collaborations such as:
- NeoNephos Foundation
- Carbyne Stack
- PowSyBl
- OpenAgri (democratising digital agriculture)
Together, these projects demonstrate how Europe is helping shape the future of open technology in areas like data infrastructure, energy systems, hardware enablement, security, and digital sovereignty.
Policy, Security & Digital Sovereignty in Focus
2026 will be an important year for regulatory and policy conversations around open source. LF Europe will contribute research, guidance, and community dialogue on topics such as:
- Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) implementation
- Digital sovereignty and European infrastructure
- Software supply chain security
- Regulatory vectors affecting developers
- Open collaboration in strategic industries
- LF Research will share new insights to support organizations, governments, and maintainers navigating these evolving environments.
- Community, Learning & Hands-On Resources
Linux Foundation Education will be present with:
- Training resources
- Conversations with maintainers and instructors
- Free educational materials
- This includes our free CRA course for developers and technical organizations.
Devrooms You Shouldn’t Miss at FOSDEM 2026
Here are the devrooms that we co-organise and are closely aligned with LF Europe initiatives and activities:
- EU-Policy Devroom
- Funding the FOSS Ecosystem
- Robotics & Simulation
- CRA in Practice
- SBOMs & Supply Chains
- Energy
- Embedded, Mobile & Automotive
If your work touches infrastructure, embedded, policy, energy, AI, or cybersecurity, these sessions are worth bookmarking.
Session Highlights:
Accelerating the open source flywheel in Europe with private sector & VC funding
Gabriele Columbro (Linux Foundation Europe) and Abel Samot (Red River West) will speak at FOSDEM in the Funding the FOSS Ecosystem track. The session explores how enterprise and VC funding, often overlooked in Europe, can strengthen upstream open source projects and fuel sustainable commercial ecosystems. Drawing on insights from the State of Commercial Open Source report, the speakers will share perspectives from LF Europe and Commit, Europe’s first VC fund dedicated to commercial open source. Learn more.
Global collaboration and Europe's digital sovereignty goals: debate
As Europe moves from slogans to strategy on digital sovereignty, open source is increasingly recognised as a foundation of technological autonomy. Yet the conversation often gets stuck on questions of origin and ownership that don’t align with how open source ecosystems actually function.
This panel will explore sovereignty as a matter of capability, participation, and influence, and how deeper engagement in global open source communities can reinforce, rather than dilute, Europe’s strategic autonomy. The discussion brings together perspectives from Gabriele Columbro of LF Europe and FINOS, Vittorio Bertola of Open-Xchange, and Thierry Carrez of the OpenInfra Foundation, with moderation by Paula Grzegorzewska (LF Europe). Learn more.
OpenStack Community Meetup BOF
Members of the OpenStack community gather for open discussion on topics from development to operations, share experiences, and connect with other contributors and users. The meetup provides a relaxed environment to talk through technical and community challenges, and importantly, to welcome potential new contributors or users who want to learn more about the project and how to get involved in its ecosystem.
Zero‑Touch HPC Nodes: NetBox, Tofu and Packer for a Self‑Configuring SLURM Cluster
Ümit Seren and Leon Schwarzäugl outline how to automate the onboarding of high-performance computing (HPC) nodes so they can go from being physically installed to joining a SLURM cluster with zero manual steps. Building on five years of running an OpenStack-based HPC system for life sciences, they describe an end-to-end “zero-touch” pipeline where NetBox serves as the source of truth for hardware inventory, Tofu/Terragrunt provisions the OpenStack/Ironic infrastructure and network fabric across environments, and Packer with Ansible produces images that let nodes self-configure and securely fetch credentials at first boot. The session also covers challenges encountered with tools like cloud-init in complex bare-metal contexts and shows how reusable, reproducible open-source tooling can simplify large cluster deployment.
Downstream Mindset vs Upstream Communities
The OpenInfra Foundation’s Director of Community, Ildikó Váncsa will present on how corporate approaches to open source can unintentionally harm the projects and broader ecosystems they rely on. As more companies encourage employees to work on open source or open source their code, without support and training in contributing effectively upstream, projects face issues like maintainer burnout and coordination challenges. The talk outlines how corporate priorities can clash with community norms, what individual contributors can do to improve engagement, and offers tools to help educate employers on why nurturing upstream involvement is not just good for open source but smart business strategy.
Sessions from LF Networking project:
Harnessing Hardware for High-Performance Traffic Management in VPP
As networks scale to 100G+ speeds, software-based traffic management in VPP becomes a limiting factor for performance and SLA compliance. This talk introduces a hardware-assisted TM framework that offloads shaping and scheduling to NICs, SmartNICs, and DPUs via a vendor-neutral API, enabling line-rate performance with low latency. The approach makes VPP ready for demanding telecom and data center workloads without sacrificing its open, modular design.Learn more.
Terabits without Tall Tales: Reproducible Packet & Session Benchmarks in FD.io (CSIT + VPP)
This talk explains how FD.io uses CSIT benchmarks-as-code to deliver open, reproducible packet and session performance results for VPP—moving beyond “race-track” numbers toward production-relevant metrics. It introduces MLRsearch for conditional throughput (NDR/PDR), a continuous benchmarking pipeline, and a broad test matrix covering real-world use cases like QUIC, NAT, IPsec, and NGFW. Learn more.
Scaling Secure Network Functions: High-Performance IPsec with FD.io VPP for VNFs and CNFs
This talk explores how FD.io VPP delivers scalable, high-performance IPsec for virtualized and cloud-native network functions. It covers VPP’s IPsec architecture, real-world performance results, and best practices for deploying secure, high-throughput tunnels in VNFs and CNFs. Learn more.
Fringe Events: LF Europe Evening Reception
As part of the annual FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Software Developers European Meeting), the Linux Foundation Europe organises a special evening Reception for relaxed networking and conversations about all things open source on 31 January. We look forward to bringing together developers and open source enthusiasts from around the world.
Proudly sponsored by:
Cloud Native Computing Foundation, OpenSSF, LF Education, OpenInfra, Dronecode, Sovereign Tech Agency.
Registrations are now full. We will reopen the page if additional seats become available. Stay tuned for more details.
Zephyr Project Meetup — Brussels, Belgium (Jan 30, 2026, 14:00–18:00)
An in-person meetup focused on embedded systems and Zephyr-powered products, held as a FOSDEM fringe event. Registration required; seats limited.
PX4 Community Meetup @ Leuven, Belgium
Join the PX4 community for a half-day meetup in Leuven, just ahead of FOSDEM. Sponsored by Septentrio, this event brings together UAV and robotics developers, researchers, and industry professionals for technical talks, live demos, and hands-on discussion about GNSS resilience and PX4 integration. Learn more.
Local Tips from Our Brussels Based Team Member - Paula Grzegorzewska, Strategic Partnerships Senior Manager, LF Europe
If you are visiting Brussels for EU Open Source Week for the first time, Paula shares a few simple suggestions to make the most of your time between sessions, devrooms, and evening events:
The Best Fries: You really have two great options here. Paula recommends Frituur Tabora right in the center, or heading over to Frit Flagey at Place Flagey. Both are legendary with locals for the perfect Belgian fry.
The Waffle Car experience: Don't overthink it, just try a waffle from a waffle car. These yellow trucks are everywhere, and honestly, there’s nothing better than a warm waffle while you’re on the move between meetings.
Stretch your legs: If you need a break from the crowds, take a walk at Bois de la Cambre. It’s a huge, beautiful park right next to the ULB campus where FOSDEM happens. It’s the best spot to get some fresh air and clear your head.
Sample the Beer: You are in the land of beer, so make sure to try one of the million beers Belgium has to offer.
Have a topic in mind? Interested to talk with us?
Interested in talking with the LF Europe team about digital sovereignty, CRA, or related topics? You can find us at the EU Open Source Policy Summit and across FOSDEM, we would be happy to connect.
Next Stop after FOSDEM 2026:
FOSS Backstage 2026, March 16 & 17, 2026:
Does FOSS Buy Sovereignty? Participation vs. Ownership
Policy debates often assume FOSS adoption delivers digital sovereignty. But does it? Sovereignty stems not from license freedoms but from technical capacity and community influence. Active participation in FOSS development—not mere adoption—determines whether nations achieve independence from proprietary lock-in and foreign control. A session by Mirko Boehm, Senior Director for Community Development, LF Europe. Learn more.
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 23 -26, March 2026 & Open Sovereign Cloud Day 23 March 2026
Once EU Open Source Week wraps up, the LF Europe team will turn toward KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026, where we will co-host Open Sovereign Cloud Day 2026.
Open Sovereign Cloud Day brings together cloud native practitioners, maintainers, and public/private sector stakeholders to explore how open source technologies support digital sovereignty, including data residency, interoperability, and regulatory compliance across Europe.
The event is part of the CNCF-hosted Co-located Events at KubeCon Europe, with an All-Access Pass option available for in-person attendees.
Topics include:
- Sovereign cloud infrastructure
- Data & AI sovereignty
- Operational resiliency
- Supply chain transparency
- Security & compliance in regulated sectors
Key Dates:
- Call for Proposals (CFP): Submissions accepted through Sunday, 25 January 2026 at 23:59 CEST
- Sponsorship Deadline: Signed contracts must be received by Monday, 2 February 2026
Get Involved:
- Sponsor the event: Contact sponsor@cncf.io to secure your sponsorship
- Speak at the event: Submit a proposal through the CFP process
EU Open Source Week 2026 demonstrates how deeply open source highlights Europe’s digital future, from cloud-native infrastructure and energy systems to secure supply chains and sovereignty. The conversations happening in Brussels this week will shape European open source strategy for years to come, and Linux Foundation Europe is proud to support the developers, maintainers, researchers, governments, and organizations building that future.
We are excited to continue these discussions at KubeCon Europe and Open Sovereign Cloud Day, where technical innovation meets real-world implementation.
Here’s to a productive and inspiring week and to seeing you in Brussels.