Upcoming Open Source Conferences 2026

The flagship open source events in 2026 include FOSDEM (Brussels, free, February — 8,000+ attendees), CommunityOverCode (formerly ApacheCon, organized by the Apache Software Foundation), Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit (North America, Europe, Japan), and All Things Open (Raleigh, NC). GNOME Foundation hosts GUADEC annually in Europe. OpenInfra Summit focuses on cloud infrastructure open source projects. GitHub Universe and GitLab Contribute attract large developer communities. Many CNCF projects (Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy) hold their own day-long events co-located with KubeCon.

FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Developers' European Meeting) is held every February in Brussels at the Université libre de Bruxelles. It's entirely volunteer-organized, completely free to attend, and draws 8,000–10,000 developers from across Europe and beyond. The conference runs 800+ talks across 30+ developer rooms covering everything from the Linux kernel to Nix, Erlang, LibreOffice, Fedora, and legal/licensing tracks. There's no registration — you simply show up. The developer room system, where communities self-organize their own mini-conferences within FOSDEM, is what makes it uniquely valuable. Recordings of all talks are published free within days of the event.

Open source conferences are one of the best ways to go from user to contributor. Most large events host contributor sprints — structured sessions where maintainers guide first-time contributors through the codebase, issue triage, and pull request process. PyCon, DjangoCon, RubyConf, and many others run sprints in the days after the main event. Before the conference: pick a project you use, find a "good first issue" on GitHub, and read the contribution guide. At the event: attend the project's talk, introduce yourself to maintainers at their table during sprints. The open source community is generally welcoming to newcomers with genuine interest.

Legal and governance tracks at open source conferences address some of the most consequential decisions in technology. Regular topics include: GPL compliance and enforcement (Software Freedom Conservancy, SFLC), Open Source Initiative's definition debates (SSPL, Business Source License), open source security obligations under EU CRA (Cyber Resilience Act), SBOM (Software Bill of Materials) requirements, contributor license agreements (CLAs vs. DCO), OpenChain compliance for enterprise supply chains, and trademark policy for foundation-managed projects. The Linux Foundation's FOSS Legal track and FOSDEM's Legal and Policy room are the best places to follow these issues.

Community and governance are central themes at CommunityOverCode (Apache Foundation), OSCON (O'Reilly, on hiatus but influential), and the Community Leadership Summit (co-located with OSCON historically). Topics include: open source project health metrics (CHAOSS project), sustainable maintainer funding models (GitHub Sponsors, Open Collective, Tidelift), foundation governance (ASF, LF, CNCF, Eclipse), diversity and inclusion in open source communities, burnout prevention for maintainers, and corporate open source strategy. The Linux Foundation's TODO Group hosts regular working sessions on open source program offices (OSPOs) at major events.

Yes — open source security is a fast-growing conference topic following high-profile incidents like Log4Shell, XZ Utils backdoor, and npm supply chain attacks. OpenSSF Day (co-located with Linux Foundation events) covers supply chain security, vulnerability disclosure, and security tooling for open source. FOSDEM has a dedicated Security devroom. Topics in 2026 include: Sigstore and keyless signing, SLSA supply chain levels, OpenSSF Scorecard adoption, memory-safe languages (Rust, Go) replacing C in critical projects, SBOM tooling (Syft, Grype, SPDX), and responsible disclosure programs for open source projects. OSS-Fuzz and fuzzing infrastructure are also regular conference topics.