License: CC BY-SA 4.0 Unofficial! draft! no fighting.. yet! 🌸 Reminders Purpose "Having a well-defined policy in place, that’s great, but it’s got to be a well-defined minimal policy. Otherwise you get lawyers, security folks, business folks, all piling in their concerns and constraints. Soon you end up with a strait-jacket full of policy that basically means that nobody can do anything." - Jeff McAffer , director of the Open Source Programs Office at Microsoft 💡 Rationale Software as a Digital Public Good

Title of Devroom: Distributions Elaborate description of proposed devroom(Including possible Topics): Distributions still matter in a world filled with containers and single-task virtual machines. Without distributions, software is bespoke to install and difficult to audit & manage at scale. Distributions have responded to the changing nature of workloads by specializing and becoming more flexible. This has kept distributions as a critical component in the DevOps transformations that require assembling piles of software into delivery vehicles in a repeatable, reliable, and functional manner. This is the core problem that distributions have always solved. Every distribution is responsible for building, testing, and releasing software as well as managing the lifecycle of each application in the collection. Additionally, distributions do very important work in ensuring that various versions of upstream software work well together and can co-exist. Distributions are also, often responsible, for "de-vendoring" upstream software so that security fixes can be applied more quickly. For this Distributions devroom, we want to focus on the ways that distribution technologies can be leveraged or reused to ease creation of a multi-verse of artifacts from a single source tree. We also want to continue to highlight the huge efforts being made in shared environments around Build/Test/Release cycles. Hot topics related to the delivery problem as it impacts updates in terms of both size and rollback/reliability are expected to be featured along with new solutions being developed for containers, virtual machines, and IoT (Internet of Things). Why does it fit FOSDEM?: Far from being just something cared about by "the old guard", distribution developers and maintainers are widely represented at FOSDEM. Many attendees are involved (in one form or another) in the distribution space and would benefit both as a speaker or in the audience of the devroom. Additionally, as the open source community grows, many FOSDEM attendees don't realize how much of what they rely on is provided by distributions. This is not a platform for debate about the merits of distribution A vs B as much as a statement about why picking a distribution—any distribution—remains a critical success factor for applications.