Open Source Summit Europe 2026: who we met

Three days at the Prague Congress Centre

From 7 to 9 October the Linux Foundation held Open Source Summit Europe 2026 at the Prague Congress Centre, together with the Embedded Linux Conference and next to the Linux Plumbers Conference. It was the show’s second media partnership, and the first event to carry the Udienza name and logo on its own sponsor page. How it sits among the rest of the season is in the show’s overview of the conferences of 2026.

The host, Luca Berton, had a calendar of ten-minute recordings. Marcin Czupryniak filmed and recorded sound for all of them. Some of the best moments came in between: in a corridor, at a booth, at the reception in Žofín Palace. This is who the show met, in roughly the order the week happened.

The guests

The episodes from Prague are recorded and in the edit. None is out yet, and none has a page here yet. They will be released soon, one at a time, on Tuesdays like every episode.

• Greg Kroah-Hartman Linux stable kernel maintainer

  Linux Foundation Release soon

• Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo Maintainer of pahole and perf tooling

  Red Hat Release soon

• The Percona team Open source databases

  Percona Release soon

• Kavitha Daula VP of Engineering

  Edera Release soon

• Ben Potter Head of Developer Relations

  Coder Release soon

• Bob Killen and Daniel Krook Technical program management and developer experience

  Cloud Native Computing Foundation Release soon

• benny Vasquez Chair of the board

  AlmaLinux OS Foundation Release soon

• Mario Sánchez Prada WPE WebKit

  Igalia Release soon

• Thilo Fromm Flatcar maintainer, Microsoft

  Flatcar Container Linux Release soon

Wednesday: kernel people and the first booths

Greg Kroah-Hartman, the Linux stable kernel maintainer at the Linux Foundation, met the show by the badge desk on Wednesday morning. That same morning he was in the keynotes another way: he wrote the foreword of the State of Open Source in Europe report launched there. Release soon.

Carol Chen, a speaker at the summit, stopped for a photo with the crew just before the press panel started.

Around midday the show stopped at the Percona booth, with its view over Prague, for a quick conversation about open source databases. Release soon.

Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo of Red Hat, maintainer of pahole and perf tooling, recorded in the afternoon. The conversation was about twenty years of pahole and how a developer tool became part of BPF’s infrastructure. He was still wearing the lavalier mic when this photo was taken. Release soon.

Kavitha Daula, VP of Engineering at Edera, hosted the show at their booth for a conversation on hypervisor isolation for containers and AI agents. Release soon.

At the end of the day the crew found the OpenBao people near the OpenSSF booth: Toni Tauro of Adfinis and Andrii Fedorchuk, with Marcin in the middle as usual.

benny Vasquez, who chairs the board of the AlmaLinux OS Foundation, was on the floor too. A proper conversation was set for the next day.

The evening belonged to Žofín Palace and the reception for 35 years of Linux, with Tux on stage and a casino night. The host wrote it up separately.

Thursday: foundations and the show floor

Thursday started with Ben Potter, Head of Developer Relations at Coder, on cloud development environments and AI coding agents: what changes when the developer at the keyboard is an agent, and where it should run. Thanks to Cassandra Jowett at Coder for setting it up. Release soon.

In the afternoon the crew ran into Ralph Squillace and Marco D’Angelo of Radixia in one of the lounges.

Then came the session with Bob Killen and Daniel Krook of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, arranged by Haley White and the Linux Foundation’s press team. Bob is Director of Technical Program Management and Daniel Senior Director of Developer Experience; between them they look after the foundation’s projects, about 230 of them that week. The conversation went from how the Technical Oversight Committee judges a project to why AI agents stress Kubernetes. The host’s write-up of the interview has the detail. The episode will be released soon.

After that came the AlmaLinux OS Foundation booth and the conversation with benny Vasquez. AlmaLinux is compatible with RHEL and wants its own technical direction, and the episode is about where that line runs and what community governance protects a distribution from. Release soon.

Near the OpenSSF area the crew met Alex Scheel of Control Plane, with Toni again. Control Plane is one of the vendors behind OSERA, the patch standard for the age of AI-found vulnerabilities that the host covered from the keynotes.

A few minutes later, on the same floor, a group that included Petr Hodina, a speaker, and Michelle Willemse of Adfinis.

The day ended at the Igalia booth with Mario Sánchez Prada, who had just given his session on WPE WebKit, the WebKit port for embedded devices. In WPE 2.54 the new WPEPlatform API became the default and the old one was deprecated; the episode is about why a mature project replaces a foundational API, and what integrators should do before the old one becomes debt. Release soon.

Friday: Linus, Flatcar and the last hallway

Friday started with Linus Torvalds and Dirk Hohndel in conversation on the main stage. Right after it, at the Microsoft booth, the show recorded Thilo Fromm, a long-time maintainer of Flatcar Container Linux, the minimal, image-based Linux for containers that is now a CNCF incubating project. The question: Kubernetes hides so much, so why should a platform team still care about the host OS? Release soon.

Paula Grzegorzewska of Linux Foundation Europe, who co-authored the State of Open Source in Europe report, had reached out to the show herself during the week.

Before lunch the crew bumped into Diana Todea of VictoriaMetrics and a fellow attendee in the main hall.

The last stop before the airport was the openEuler booth.

After the event

The connection requests that followed tell the rest of the story. They included Nithya Ruff, Chair of the Linux Foundation board; Johan Linåker of RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, her co-presenter in the keynote “Open Source at a Crossroads”; Juliette van der Laarse, founding director of the AI Flower Foundation, whose Friday keynote argued for moving “from a thousand private agents to one open garden”; Brian “bex” Exelbierd; Andrew Randall of Azure; and engineers from Red Hat, SAP, Ericsson and JetBrains.

What the hallway taught

1. Book the recordings, but leave gaps. Half of the people above were not on the calendar.
2. Wear something people recognise. The Udienza t-shirt started more conversations than any business card.
3. Follow up within a day. The people messaged on Wednesday evening were the ones with a real second conversation by Friday.

Where to read more

The host’s coverage, by theme, is in his guide to the Prague week. The original, first-person version of this list is People I Met at Open Source Summit Europe 2026, and how the calendar was built is in How I Booked 20 Interviews.

Next

The Prague episodes will be released soon, on Tuesdays like every episode: on YouTube first, then Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Amazon Music. The home page lists every platform. If the show met you in Prague and you are not on this list, that is the host’s memory, not you.