A
Anne Dickison
Guest
For the last decade I have been working on open source software on and going to conferences, but I’ve never before answered so many questions about FreeBSD as I did this last weekend.
The first weekend in February of 2025, I took the quick hop across the North Sea and visited Brussels for the third time to experience FOSDEM in a completely new way.
FOSDEM is arguably the largest open source conference in the world. For one weekend at the end of January each year the ULB campus is opened up and nearly 10,000 developers, users, advocates and curious persons descend on the University campus.
To keep so many people entertained FOSDEM 2025 hosted 78 separate tracks, with a main track filling the massive 3000 seater lecture room and many many other Devrooms (Developer Rooms) allowing smaller communities a window to share their recent ideas and developments. This year saw the return of the BSD Devroom which hosted 8 talks with contributions from all of the major BSD projects.
Apart from the small window where I slipped away to give my own talk in the BSD Devroom (Writing About FreeBSD), I let the 1000 other talks slip away and spent the rest of the weekend staffing the FreeBSD stand.
In addition to the talks and the sessions arranged in Devrooms FOSDEM gives selected Open Source Projects space at a stand. This gives projects to advertise and acts as point for users to meet developers and for projects to sell the world on their virtues, new releases and some times give away tickers.
For FOSDEM 2025 I agreed to help organise the FreeBSD project stand. With assistance from several project members we talked about why one might use FreeBSD almost non-stop for the two days of the conference. We gave away the 750 project stickers I was sent with and a couple other thousand stickers a community member showed up with.
We were met by FreeBSD users past and present who said nice things and got the opportunity to “sell” FreeBSD to a ton of other people either not familiar or completely new to the project.
Rodrigo (rodrigo@, who also helps organise the BSD Devroom) came with more stickers featuring
vintage FreeBSD project logos (from before the Orb), printed jail cheat sheets by Paduka Jorat (which were quickly all snarfed up) and some mugs. Rodrigo had printed mugs with the art from Michael W. Lukas’s TLS Mastery which features the BSD daemon in Munch’s “The Scream”. Rodrigo’s wife was skeptical that many of these would be sold, by the official start time on Saturday morning all 10 of the mugs had been bought up.
Along with giving FreeBSD stickers to anyone who got too close to our table, we also answered questions. The range of questions was really enlightening, once we got past “what is FreeBSD” the questions were a great way to get an idea of areas we can better explain, both at in person events and online.
Some choice questions included:
I found the “What runs” and “What can I use FreeBSD for” questions really interesting. It suggests that we are being compared to Linux Distros which sit in a more specialised niche. In that environment we really stand out as a general purpose operating system.
There was certainly a theme in the questions I was asked, from inside the Operating System development world it is easy to think that everyone knows what you know (I spent a lot of my days in awe at the limits of my own knowledge). It was enlightening to explain that not only do we have an entire operating system, but it will run almost all the software you can think of and it will do it really well. We can certainly be overlooked, but for most use cases I think we are more than just competitive.
FOSDEM 2025 was a great experience for me. It was really refreshing to meet old and new friends. This was my first chance to meet some of the other engineers working at the FreeBSD Foundation and spent a weekend talking about how great FreeBSD is.
The questions from the community and the response to the stickers (and mugs!) have given me a ton of ideas on how we can present the project better in the future. Human interactions are the best way to relate the project to new comers, but demos are enticing and a great way to start that conversation.
I hope to be at FOSDEM again in 2026, and if I make it there will be some real novelties for anyone dropping by the FreeBSD table both to experience and maybe to take home.
— Contributed by Tom Jones
The post Advocating for FreeBSD: A FOSDEM 2025 Trip Report first appeared on FreeBSD Foundation.
Continue reading...
The first weekend in February of 2025, I took the quick hop across the North Sea and visited Brussels for the third time to experience FOSDEM in a completely new way.
FOSDEM is arguably the largest open source conference in the world. For one weekend at the end of January each year the ULB campus is opened up and nearly 10,000 developers, users, advocates and curious persons descend on the University campus.
To keep so many people entertained FOSDEM 2025 hosted 78 separate tracks, with a main track filling the massive 3000 seater lecture room and many many other Devrooms (Developer Rooms) allowing smaller communities a window to share their recent ideas and developments. This year saw the return of the BSD Devroom which hosted 8 talks with contributions from all of the major BSD projects.
In addition to the talks and the sessions arranged in Devrooms FOSDEM gives selected Open Source Projects space at a stand. This gives projects to advertise and acts as point for users to meet developers and for projects to sell the world on their virtues, new releases and some times give away tickers.
For FOSDEM 2025 I agreed to help organise the FreeBSD project stand. With assistance from several project members we talked about why one might use FreeBSD almost non-stop for the two days of the conference. We gave away the 750 project stickers I was sent with and a couple other thousand stickers a community member showed up with.
We were met by FreeBSD users past and present who said nice things and got the opportunity to “sell” FreeBSD to a ton of other people either not familiar or completely new to the project.
Rodrigo (rodrigo@, who also helps organise the BSD Devroom) came with more stickers featuring
Along with giving FreeBSD stickers to anyone who got too close to our table, we also answered questions. The range of questions was really enlightening, once we got past “what is FreeBSD” the questions were a great way to get an idea of areas we can better explain, both at in person events and online.
Some choice questions included:
- What desktop does FreeBSD run?
- What can you do with FreeBSD?
- Can I have a sticker?
- Who uses FreeBSD?
- Why pick FreeBSD over X Linux Distro?
- Convince my friend here to use FreeBSD?
- Can I run containers on FreeBSD?
I found the “What runs” and “What can I use FreeBSD for” questions really interesting. It suggests that we are being compared to Linux Distros which sit in a more specialised niche. In that environment we really stand out as a general purpose operating system.
There was certainly a theme in the questions I was asked, from inside the Operating System development world it is easy to think that everyone knows what you know (I spent a lot of my days in awe at the limits of my own knowledge). It was enlightening to explain that not only do we have an entire operating system, but it will run almost all the software you can think of and it will do it really well. We can certainly be overlooked, but for most use cases I think we are more than just competitive.
FOSDEM 2025 was a great experience for me. It was really refreshing to meet old and new friends. This was my first chance to meet some of the other engineers working at the FreeBSD Foundation and spent a weekend talking about how great FreeBSD is.
The questions from the community and the response to the stickers (and mugs!) have given me a ton of ideas on how we can present the project better in the future. Human interactions are the best way to relate the project to new comers, but demos are enticing and a great way to start that conversation.
I hope to be at FOSDEM again in 2026, and if I make it there will be some real novelties for anyone dropping by the FreeBSD table both to experience and maybe to take home.
— Contributed by Tom Jones
The post Advocating for FreeBSD: A FOSDEM 2025 Trip Report first appeared on FreeBSD Foundation.
Continue reading...