Software Freedom Kosova, 11th Edition, and Why We Keep Going Back

Here is something worth sitting with for a second.

Richard Stallman, the man who started the GNU Project and wrote the GPL, the licence a meaningful chunk of the modern world runs under, has given a talk in Prishtina. So has Peter Salus, who wrote the history of Unix. So has Mikel Maron from OpenStreetMap. Arduino has sent people, including co-founder David Cuartielles.

Not to Berlin. Not to Amsterdam. Here.

That is Software Freedom Kosova, and it is back for its 11th edition, 1 to 3 October 2026.

It started with 170 people and a lot of nerve

October 2009. Kosovo had been an independent country for eighteen months. FLOSSK, a Prishtina non-profit founded that same year, decided the thing the place needed was an international conference about free software, and put one on at the Faculty of Engineering.

More than 170 people showed up. Nobody had confidently predicted that.

Seventeen years on it is the oldest and largest free software conference in Southeastern Europe. At its seventh edition it ran 48 lectures and workshops over three days with 43 speakers from 18 countries. Those are real conference numbers, in a city most European tech circuits still fly straight over.

The thing that makes it work is that it never became only a developer event. Students, researchers, founders, artists, activists and public sector people end up in the same rooms. Some of the best conversations at SFK happen between two people who would never have been put in a room together anywhere else.

Last year they asked whether androids dream

The 10th edition, October 2025, ran under a Philip K. Dick borrowing, Do androids dream?, with a black sheep on cream, torn into RGB fringes like a signal going bad.

While most of the industry spent 2025 asking what AI could do, SFK's programme asked the questions that actually decide who ends up benefiting from it. What were these models trained on. Are the weights open, or just free of charge. Can anyone outside the lab inspect the tooling.

Having Arduino people in the room for that was not an accident. The open hardware crowd has been having the openness argument for twenty years longer than the AI industry has existed, and it shows.

This year's cover keeps the habit of making the poster do work: a grid of cells spelling S, F, K and ?, resolving out of noise into FLOSSK's crow. It is a Game of Life board, complicated behaviour emerging from simple rules that anyone is allowed to read. You could do worse as a definition of free software.

The people running it were youth

Something else stood out last year, and it had nothing to do with the programme.

The volunteers running the conference were young. Youth, carrying equipment, steering lost attendees, keeping three days of an international event moving. And then you would end up in a conversation with one of them about why open source matters, and they would argue the case properly, like people who had thought about it rather than people repeating a slogan from a lanyard.

You cannot buy that. No marketing budget produces young people who will give up a weekend to advocate for software freedom. You get it one way only, which is by a community showing up in the same city for seventeen years until the people who grew up around it are ready to run the thing themselves.

That is the part of SFK that is genuinely hard to replicate, and it is the reason we take it seriously as more than a date in a calendar.

The uncomfortable part

Every edition since 2009 has circled the same idea: the people who build the foundations should be visible.

They mostly are not. Almost all commercial software is assembled on open source. The cryptography, the HTTP stack, the compression, the runtime, the operating system, all written by people who were never paid for it and are named nowhere on the product. This is usually completely legal. Permissive licences exist so companies can do exactly this, and that is a good arrangement, not a scandal.

The problem is what invisibility does. Dependencies nobody can see do not get funded, do not get maintainers, and do not get succession plans. That is how the entire internet spent a weekend in December 2021 waiting on unpaid Log4j volunteers. It is how, in 2024, a backdoor got within touching distance of every Linux distribution on earth by way of one exhausted maintainer of a compression library, caught because a Microsoft engineer noticed a benchmark running half a second slow.

SFK's answer to this has never been to lecture companies. It is to put maintainers, students and founders in one building for three days and let the dependency become visible in both directions.

Which brings us to us

We would be talking rubbish if we made that argument and left ourselves out of it.

EliteDev is a commercial software company. We invoice clients. And almost nothing underneath our work is ours.

Take this site as the example, since you are already on it. The pages are rendered by Next.js and React. Content is managed in Payload, an open source CMS, writing into PostgreSQL, a database a global community has maintained since the nineties and which nobody owns. Tailwind handles styling. Lexical handles rich text. Sharp resizes every image you see. Node.js runs the whole thing, on Linux.

That is only the part you can see from the outside. The way the work actually gets done is open source too. We write in TypeScript. We catch our mistakes with ESLint and format with Prettier. Tests run in Vitest and Playwright. Packages are installed with pnpm. Every change is tracked in Git. Take any one of those away and our week gets materially worse.

A single client project pulls in hundreds of packages before we have written a line of anything. Most of them we will never read. Some of them are maintained by one person in their spare time.

We wrote the parts that are specific to our clients. We wrote none of the parts that made those parts possible. Every project we have ever delivered stands on decades of work by people who will never send us an invoice.

Saying so is not humility and it is not a marketing move. It is just true. And being able to state plainly what your software is made of is quietly turning into a baseline professional requirement rather than a courtesy. Under the EU Cyber Resilience Act, a Software Bill of Materials is heading from good manners toward legal obligation for anything sold in Europe. If you cannot list your dependencies, you do not fully know what you are shipping.

The useful version of supporting open source is boring, which is probably why so few bother: honour the licences, ship the attribution file, upstream your patch instead of nursing a private fork, and where you can, put money or hours into the one project whose disappearance would hurt you most.

FLOSSK does not clock off in October

The conference is the visible peak of something that runs all year. FLOSSK also keeps Prishtina Hackerspace going, an open workshop for messing about with technology, art and culture, and has worked on open data, open mapping and digital rights here for well over a decade.

That is why SFK does not feel like a conference brand flown in for a weekend. It is the annual gathering of a community that exists the other 362 days.

October

Prishtina, 1 to 3 October 2026.

The call for speakers has closed and the programme is being put together, so the only thing left to decide is whether you are in the room. Registration and the sponsorship prospectus are at sfk.flossk.org, and for a non-profit conference, sponsors are the difference between it happening and not.

If you write software anywhere in this region, this is the rare event where the international open source world comes to you instead of you saving up to go to it. Seventeen years of that, run by people with no commercial reason to bother, and now carried by youth who grew up with it.

And if you run a company here: your product is built on open source whether or not you have ever thought about it. This is three days in the company of the people who wrote it.

We will be there.