20 years of FrOSCon - a lively meeting place for the open source community

The conference keynotes are a particular highlight in the programme calendar, and this year's keynotes once again addressed highly topical issues that were discussed at length during the conference:

On Saturday, Daniel Stenberg, as maintainer of the cURL project, reported on AI-generated bug bounty submissions, which would steal developers' time and nerves for important tasks and their private lives, in the more than full lecture hall 1/2. The submitted reports look legitimate and critical at first, but after hours of work in some cases, it only becomes clear that the reported vulnerabilities do not even exist, but have only been hallucinated by the AI. Sorting out these reports, which make up around 20 to 40 per cent of all submissions, also poses the risk of genuine and possibly even critical bug reports being rejected if they appear AI-generated.

Andy Piper, Head of Communications at Mastodon, reported in his keynote speech on Sunday how, despite the outstanding development of the decentralised internet, humanity is on a steady path back to centralised data sources such as large social media services and AI out of convenience and what dangers this movement entails. He presented the Fediverse, a free association of open source and self-hostable social media services, with applications such as Mastodon and PeerTube, which are similar to classic centralised services such as Twitter and YouTube, as an existing and constantly growing alternative. In particular, the FediVerse also offers a space for new ideas and applications.

The fact that everything ran like clockwork during this extensive programme was thanks to the 35-strong organising team and 150 volunteers. They made it possible for developers, users and interested parties to concentrate fully on the conference programme, the exchange of ideas and networking.