GoKawiil
Tech News
At FOSSY 2026, Chromium developer Sharon Yang described her move from a six-year engineering role at Google to her current position at Igalia, an employee-owned cooperative. Her talk, titled 'From Corporate to Co-op,' compared how the two organizations approach Chromium development despite both contributing to the same open-source codebase and working with overlapping teams.
At the FOSSY conference held this year at the University of British Columbia, developer Timothy Sample presented on bootstrappable builds, a lesser-known cousin of reproducible builds. He explained the concept as a chain of increasingly capable compilers that starts from a tiny, fully auditable seed program and eventually builds an entire modern Linux user space. Sample traced his own decade-long involvement in the effort back to his early use of GNU Guix, a functional package manager similar to Nix.
At FOSSY 2026, Software Freedom Conservancy members Bradley Kühn, Karen Sandler, and Denver Gingerich detailed an unresolved license violation involving Bambu Lab's 3D-printer software, which is licensed under the AGPLv3. They explained that the company's method of restricting user control over the software is exactly the kind of network-based circumvention the AGPL was designed to block, and described SFC's outreach to build alternatives for affected users.