FOSDEM is one of the world's premier meetings of free software developers, with thousands of people attending each year. FOSDEM 2023 will take place on the weekend of 4-5 February 2023 and it will be an in-person event in Brussels once again!
For the first time, a track ("devroom") about Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) has been accepted in the conference.
The devroom will take place for half a day (09:00-12:50), on Sunday morning, as an in-person event in a room to be announced at a later time.
The SBOM Devroom at FOSDEM 2023 is an informal, technical, in-person event oriented to authors, users, and enthusiasts of FLOSS programs that produce, consume, or transform SBOMs.
While other domains like construction, mechanical engineering, or even computer hardware have long used the concept of Bill of Materials (BOMs), software traditionally has not followed this best practice. There have been efforts running for over a decade to address this, and recent developments have pushed forward the use and wide adoption of Software BOMs. Since most of today’s software is made up of Open Source, it is important that this information can be accurately conveyed. It includes, but is not limited to, metadata such as name and version but also licensing or security information.
The goal of the devroom is for interested people to get in touch with each other, exchange ideas and opinions, have interesting and hopefully productive discussions, and finally what is most important: to have fun.
We are looking for presenters!
We are interested in presentations on any topic related to Software Bill of Materials: content, definitions, standardization efforts, tools, etc.
An indicative, non-exclusive, list of topics:
- Tools that produce SBOMs or related information
- Tools that consume SBOMs to generate other information
- Case studies and lessons learned from real-life use or introduction of SBOMs
- Use of different types of SBOMs (e.g., Source, Build, Runtime, etc.)
- Linking and verification of SBOMs to other relevant artifacts
- Special areas of interest not covered by current SBOM formats, that need discussion to be included
Any effort that would lead on increasing collaboration between different approaches and tools are particularly encouraged.
- 28 November: Submission deadline
- 16 December: Announcement of selected talks
- 5 February: SBOM devroom in FOSDEM - You must be available in person to present your talk
Please use the Pentabarf system to submit a talk proposal for the devroom. On the "General" tab, please look for the "Track" option and choose "Software Bill of Materials devroom". Note: if you have used FOSDEM Pentabarf before, please do not create a new account/username but rather use your existing one.
FOSDEM devrooms are a welcoming environment for people who have never given a talk before. Please feel free to contact the devroom administrators personally if you would like to ask any questions about it.
The Pentabarf system will ask for many of the essential details. Remember to re-use your account from previous years if you have one.
We will be looking for relevance to the conference and devroom themes, but essentially any presentation about SBOMs would qualify. Please note that the audience is expected to be developers of Free and Open Source Software and will most probably be knowledgeable in at least some aspects of SBOMs. Therefore aim your presentation accordingly.
Feel free to indicate your preferred duration for your presentation between 5 and 30 minutes, but please note that the final decision on duration will be made by the devroom administrators based on the number of accepted proposals. As the overall duration of the devroom is fixed and rather short, no presentation will exceed 30 minutes (including Q&A), so that more speakers can participate. Keep in mind that, as the event will be in-person, we also need to account for switching between speakers. Shorter presentation are strongly encouraged!
Please note FOSDEM aims to record and live-stream all talks. The CC-BY license is used for the recordings.
To make the devroom run successfully, we are always looking for volunteers. If you will be attending the devroom and would like to help, please reach out to the organizers!
If you know of any mailing lists or other online venues where this info and CfP would be relevant, please feel free to forward this document.
The organizers of the devroom can be reached by sending email to sbom-devroom-manager@fosdem.org. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any inquiry or suggestion for the devroom.
For any private queries, you may also contact the organizers directly:
- Alexios Zavras fosdem@zvr.gr
- Kate Stewart stewart@linux.com
- Adolfo García Veytia puerco@chainguard.dev