Codethink’s Insights and Highlights from FOSDEM 2025

On 1st and 2nd February, FOSDEM celebrated its 25th anniversary. As is tradition, a large group of the Codethink team (30+ people) travelled to Brussels (by planes, trains, and automobiles) to participate in debates and discussions with thousands of other open source community members. Between us, we helped with volunteering, drank lots of Club-Mate, and delivered a company record of six talks.

Once again, Codethink is incredibly proud to sponsor FOSDEM.

In this blog post, find out what the Codethink team got up to at ULB’s Campus du Solbosch.

Introducing the Trustable Software Framework

On Saturday, Codethink chairman Paul Sherwood delivered the presentation ‘The Trustable Software Framework: A new way to measure risk in continuous delivery of critical software’.

It was standing room only as Paul introduced the Trustable Software Framework (TSF), a new FOSS project establishing an evidence-based method for measuring the risks involved in the continuous delivery of software in critical environments.

In his talk, Paul explained the core concepts behind TSF, its defining principles and tenets, and questioned conventional wisdom, asking the audience: "Why do you trust software?"

At a time when trust in software is more important than ever, Paul’s talk questioned the viability of established approaches to software when dealing with increasingly complex systems.

Watch Paul’s talk here.
Learn more about the Trustable Software Framework and the Trustable tenets.

Other Codethink talks

That wasn’t all! Codethink also sponsored some engineers to give talks on topics from RISC-V to GNOME:

• ‘Automated testing for mobile images using GNOME’ by Sam Thursfield
• ‘RISC-V Linux bug hunting’ by Ben Dooks
• ‘Upstream Embedded Linux on RISC-V: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ by Marcel Ziswiler
• ‘Fedora Silverblue With Disk Encryption’ by Marcel Ziswiler
• ‘How to push your testing upstream’ by Sam Thursfield

Thank you to everyone who attended and asked insightful questions.

We'll soon have videos of each talk available. Stay tuned to LinkedIn, Mastodon, and Bluesky for updates.

What else did we get up to?

FOSDEM is an excellent opportunity for the Codethink team to learn and develop their knowledge of open source software and, ultimately, become better developers. With a broad range of tracks and rooms (such as ‘Community’, ‘Cloud Native Databases’, ‘RISC-V’, ‘Robotics and Simulation’) there was something for everyone.

Some of our favourite talks included:

• ‘Lessons Learned Open Sourcing the UK’s Covid Tracing App’ by Terence Eden
• ‘Pick My Project! Lessons Learned from Interviewing and Writing 20+ End User Case Studies’ by Bill Mulligan
• ‘Program to Learn: The Power of Creative Coding’ by Bernant Romagos, John Maloney, Jens Mönig, Jadga Huegle
• ‘Understanding programming peculiarities’ by Katie McLaughlin
• ‘What should Teal be? - musings on FOSS project directions’ by Hisham Muhammad
• ‘Pushing the Sega Dreamcast with GCC’ by Falco Girgis
• ‘Stratoshark: Applying the power of Wireshark’ to System Calls and Logs’ by Gerald Combs, Nigel Douglas
• ‘Spritely and a secure, collaborative, distributed future’ by Christine Lemmer-Webber

See you next year!

FOSDEM is a fantastic place for software engineers and developers to sharpen their skills and get involved with the open source community. Whether you’re a novice or a veteran, there’s something for everyone.

Thank you to the fantastic team of volunteers who make FOSDEM a huge success ever year. We look forward to seeing you next year.