Going to FOSDEM 2025

Saturday, 18 January 2025 | Volker Krause

Barely back from 38C3 preparations for another huge event started, FOSDEM 2025, taking place in two weeks in Brussels, Belgium.

KDE

KDE will be there with a big team again, with the KDE stand being in building AW this year, on the ground floor.

There will also be talks by KDE people:

Albert will speak about Poppler, the PDF library powering not only Okular but also the travel document extractor of Itinerary, on Saturday at 11:50 in room H.2215.
Joseph will talk about how FOSS can help with reducing the carbon footprint of the IT sector, on Sunday at 11:55 in room H.2214.

And more below.

Transitous

FOSDEM also marks the first birthday of Transitous, which started a year ago following a question in the Railways and Open Transport dev room.

Transitous has come a long way since then, meanwhile containing more than 1500 GTFS feeds from 54 countries, which is beyond what we even deemed technically feasible a year ago. More than 50 people have contributed to this, and five FOSS apps (that we know of) are using Transitous as (one of) their backends already.

We are just about to complete the migration to a new major version of MOTIS, which brings a new much easier to use API, more routing options, and more powerful door-to-door (instead of station-to-station) routing, to just name a few of the improvements.

At the same time Transitous is being moved to new and more powerful hardware, again kindly provided by Spline.

A bunch of people working on Transitous will be at FOSDEM, and Felix and Marcus will cover it in their talk on Sunday at 16:30 in room K.4.601.

Emergency and Weather Alerts

As part of the FOSS on Mobile Devices track Nucleus and I will be presenting the work on free infrastructure for receiving emergency alerts, on Saturday at 15:45 in room H.2214.

Since I last wrote about this here things have moved forward quite a bit. We have first test deployment of the FOSS Public Alert Server at alerts.kde.org and FOSSWarn has a first pre-release which can make use of that.

I yet have to update the KDE public alert app prototype to make use of this though.

See you in Brussels!

With people from so many different communities around, FOSDEM has resulted in great cross-project collaborations in the past, excited to see what this one will bring and looking forward to many interesting discussions!