Petr Bokoč
Red Hatter on the Community Platform Engineering team, responsible for Fedora documentation and related matters.
Contact
- Email: pbokoc AT redhat DOT com
- Matrix: pbokoc, commonly found in #fedora-docs
- Location & Timezone: Brno, Czech Republic, UTC +1 hour (+2 in summer)
CentOS Connect & FOSDEM 2026 event report
Title & link to presentation / talk (if applicable):
Improving Docs – Fedora Docs 2025 Community Initiative and opportunities for neighborly collaboration
No presentation link, it was a "Birds of a Feather" conversation type of thing, so we didn't have slides or anything.
https://www.centos.org/events/connect/
Individual Goals for event/conference:
Attend the CentOS Connect BOF and have a conversation with CentOS contributors about collaborating on docs between CentOS & Fedora. Attend FOSDEM and see some interesting talks.
Event experience (feedback, topics discussed, insights, outcomes in relation to goals/expectations etc.):
The CentOS Connect talk was eventful - at first we didn't get much attention but eventually we got a pretty good roundtable discussion going with both Fedora and CentOS contributors. The general sentiment was that sharing docs would be a good idea due to similarities between the distributions, and everyone was excited to try it - but this idea is super old, we've tried it before, and I've seen it fail due to lack of people willing to take responsibility at least four times, so I continue to be skeptical. Sharing docs would require mass "buy-in" especially from the CentOS contributor community, and they're busy as it is.
Now, on to FOSDEM.
FOSDEM has clearly outgrown the venue it's held at (ULB), pretty much any talk that wasn't about some highly niche subject, and even some that were, were completely full, so I ended up watching a bunch of it on streams while sitting in a cafe at the campus. Of course, FOSDEM being a nonprofit event with free attendance means they depend on the ULB to provide the campus (I assume) free of charge, they can't just go and rent a conference center for 50k EUR a day, but from an attendee's point of view this sucks. The lunch rush was atrocious, too - better eat a big breakfast and wait for lunch till at least 2-3 PM.
A lot of the talks were about European policy; the EU has some regulations that will come into effect shortly that will heavily influence software development. The Cyber Resilience Act is supposed to set up rules for commercial software and hardware vendors based in Europe, which means noncommercial developers of free software shouldn't be affected, and the Digital Services Act (which has been in effect for a while but is being expanded) has demands on online communications. There were even some people from the EU bureaucracy present and we were assured multiple times that it's no big deal and nothing really changes. I don't believe them for a second.
There were some interesting talks about fundraising for open source projects through government procurement - one interesting tidbit was that western governments spend more on software procurement than Silicon Valley venture capital. Of course, the issue is that the gov spending is largely in massive, years or even decades long contracts with giant vendors like SAP, Oracle, IBM, etc., and you can't get a contract with the US Navy with your github account, they need support guarantees and SLEs... and specifically in the EU, commercial vendors that aren't already massive will be crushed by the CRA mentioned above. (They have an FAQ document so you can read all about it in a short, easy to digest form! The FAQ alone 66 pages long...)
A number of talks were related to the ongoing LLM craze; the one I enjoyed most was near the end of the conference, an expansion on the famous "AI slop" rant by curl developers that was going around twitter a few months ago. It wasn't exactly anything new to me, but it was quite amusing.
Some of the talks were very niche but quite fun, like "running a battle.net server", "running a dialup service in 2026", or one from the owner of https://esoteric.codes/ about esoteric programming languages and how they're art in their own right.
Overall, in addition to the issues with rooms being hopelessly full, I also had a problem with endless conflicts, where two talks I was interested in were taking place at the same time, or at least overlapping. Thankfully the organizers publish recordings and I have a bunch of favorites saved in the FOSDEM Companion app to watch later, but I still need to get around to it. The recordings should be all up by now though.
Follow ups & action items (e.g. ideas, learnings, tasks):
Continue to talk to CentOS people about docs collaboration.
