CentOS Connect / FOSDEM Trip Report

Waffles, fries, and beer! Can you guess where we were last week? That’s right. We were in the wonderful city of Brussels, Belgium. We were there for more than just the food and beverages. We were there to participate in FOSDEM, one of the largest events in Europe that brings together the open source community to share and discuss a variety of topics. It was held on January 31 - February 1, 2026.

As part of FOSDEM, there are fringe events that occur around this event. One of these annual events is CentOS Connect, which brings together a variety of members from the Fedora and CentOS communities along with other open source projects. This event was held two days before FOSDEM on January 29 - 30.

During CentOS Connect, we had an opportunity to interact with longtime members of the community. There were meetups in the morning on Thursday. One of the meetups centered around packaging of OpenSSL for the various distributions. The OpenSSL project is working on making it easier for distributions to package and maintain those packages. One proposal is to start versioning the OpenSSL providers. A discussion around configuration semantics was also had. What is trying to be addressed is having more transparency. There is also a need to keep up with regular changes required to satisfy security updates and FIPS validation.

In the spirit of open source, everyone in the community is encouraged to contribute in some way. One way to contribute back to projects such as Fedora, which then benefits the Enterprise Linux community, is by helping to be package maintainers. There was another meetup session held around EPEL packaging and how to get started. EPEL stands for Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux. The first step is to become a Fedora packager. Then if there are any packages missing from the Enterprise Linux distros, as a Fedora packager, one can help to bring packages over to EPEL.

On Thursday afternoon, the sessions in the main hall started. There was an announcement of a new SIG Council for CentOS, which is for coordinating technical decisions within the community and the CentOS infrastructure team at Red Hat. Also:

• There was a demo on installing CentOS from a live USB flash drive on a Steam Deck.
• Other updates were shared, such as the SIG Alt Images team is working on adding RISC-V as an architecture that they will be building images for.
• The SIG infrastructure team provided updates on all that was accomplished over the past year, such as moving infrastructure from one data center to another one.
• The EPEL Steering committee members were on stage answering questions and provided updates on policies to help with handling package management that has stalled.
• With the success of having a minor version, which started with the release of EPEL 10, there are plans to continue having minor versions for EPEL 11.

Friday was another eventful day filled with all sorts of tidbits. There was an idea proposed around improving kernel packaging. The proposal was to use Dynamic Specification Generation to produce a kernel specification file, which is used to build an RPM package. The idea is to de-duplicate and simplify the various kernel flavors, managing userspace, subpackages, etc. This would also entail having standalone packaging utilities.

We received a glimpse into the planning for Enterprise Linux 11. Fedora and CentOS Stream help shape what the next version of EL from Red Hat is going to look like and that is no different for EL11. In fact, the goal of EL11 is to have more transparency from what happened with EL10. We received a glimpse into the 60% plan. The idea is that there should be early collaboration to help refine market problems and features before release.

During FOSDEM, the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF) had a booth to represent the open source enterprise operating system project Rocky Linux. It is always a pleasure to speak with the community. Many of the core Rocky Linux and RESF board members were present. As attendees came to visit, they were excited to see us there and to grab some swag.

If you haven’t been to FOSDEM before, there are many tracks on a variety of topics. It can be difficult to choose which talks to attend. In order to get into a talk, you need to go early since space fills up quickly. Walking around the campus and seeing all the different open source projects present was amazing. Everyone, gathering together from all around the planet to share their interests and to represent their communities. Many well-known individuals within the FOSS community walking around and greeting others was inspiring.

On the second day, there was a Developer Room for Distributions for the full day. The topics ranged from packaging and code distribution to building ISOs from OCI containers to lessons that have been learned from trying to build image-based systems. At the end, we had the pleasure of having the current Debian Project Lead Andreas Tille present to give an overview of the past 32 years of Debian and current progress made in the past year.

We had a wonderful time seeing friends from all over. Forged new friendships and we are looking forward to what next year’s FOSDEM will bring. We are encouraged to continue to support and contribute back to the various communities within the overall FOSS community.