This month’s newsletter brings exciting opportunities to connect, learn, and stay informed across The ASF community. The Call for Presentations for Community Over Code 2026 is now open, and this year’s event includes a new co-located, standalone event, Lakehouse Day EU. Recent project momentum includes Apache Geode 2.0 and a real-world scale story from Apache Ozone. We also celebrate a new Top-Level Project and share reflections from FOSDEM and EU Open Source Week in the President’s Letter.
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President’s Letter
Twenty-six years ago, 1,200 open source software devotees in Brussels gathered under the name Open Source Developers’ European Meeting to hear 25 speakers. It quickly became one of the largest FOSS gatherings in the world, now called FOSDEM, descending on Brussels each February, with more than 8,000 attendees and more speakers in 2026 than there were attendees that first year. In the past few years, it has grown organically into a full week of events under the banner EU Open Source Week, with assorted groups taking advantage of so many people already gathered in one place. That week leading up to FOSDEM has become absolutely packed with important conversations, particularly related to policy and compliance, security, and inter-foundational cooperation.
At EU Open Source Policy Summit, I discussed “Europe as the World’s Home for Open Source” alongside Daniel Stenberg, Baddy Sonja Breidert, Deborah Bryant, and Fabrizia Benini, hosted by James Lovegrove. We’re living in interesting times for software and geopolitics. Digital sovereignty was the hot topic in many parts of this year’s Open Source Week (as it is at many recent events). We as an open source community have spent our careers and lives working in an ethos of community and cooperation without borders as much as possible. Open source offers balance: collaboration that leads to innovation but also options and freedom. But on that path, we have to be careful not to create friction that will decrease that collaboration that begins the chain–the collaboration that has made open source the success that it is.
At FOSDEM, I led a panel on sustainability of the open source ecosystem, which is extremely connected to those matters as well. (And thanks to Bob Callaway and Richard Littauer for joining me on that panel in the Community devroom.) Open source grew and became critical and indispensable relatively quickly, which left gaps in mentorship, addressing burnout, and of course, the ever-present matter of funding. We’re now on the precipice of a lot of change, not just from increasing regulation, but also the rapid growth of AI tools and changing security landscape. We have a lot of work to do together to make sure that open source continues to be successful. And as it is the foundation of nearly all software today, the continued success of open source is the continued success of modern life itself.
If you weren’t at FOSDEM–or even if you were, it’s impossible to see everything!–most of the recordings are now available. The ASF was well-represented across tracks, from SBOMs and supply chains, to big data, to AI. Check out all of those talks here.
Sincerely,
Ruth Suehle
President
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