[Nut-upsuser] FOSDEM 2026

[Jim Klimov]

Cheers all,

  I've symbolically picked up a lot of hats (NUT, Jenkins, illumos, Provys,
et al.) to buzz around the ULB campus like a bee, chat to people, and
pollinate the friendly distro desks and occasional window sills with NUT
stickers - yay, we have had some this year!

  The updated maintainer hoodie is still a success: catches the eye, starts
conversations, gets photographed as a business card... its marketing goal
is achieved :) Putting the URLs up front this year was a useful design fix
too.

  See https://github.com/networkupstools/nut-swag/tree/master/ if you
missed the stickers (or conference) and want to print your own (or a shirt,
or a cup...)

  I was delighted to see some people realize that they are NUT users
(unwittingly so far - it just worked for them), and others noticing the
shirt and professing their active love for the project and toolkit.
  What was doubly-pleasant, contrasting with the issue-tracker
interactions, nobody complained :)

  Many asked if I was to give any talks, have a table or devroom... hm, an
intriguing perspective (especially maybe to grab some attention from
actual, you know, UPS vendors who could chime in, in oh so many ways).

  At the very least, FOSDEM sets aside some rooms for "BOF" (Birds Of
Feather) sessions, where people cooperating in whatever area can come
together and talk for an assigned hour (recording if they like, not
organized like for conference presentations). Maybe next year, if there are
enough NUT-inclined visitors, we should book an hour of that facility.

  Following up from Daniel Stenberg's insightful closing talk on "Open
Source Security in spite of AI" about how new tools in general can
exacerbate whatever behaviors the humans have (and these tools in
particular have some controversy about them per se, and exacerbating stuff
by orders of magnitude), so there is no clear-cut "embrace it!" or "ban
it!" approach, I suppose it is time to have some sort of policy in the NUT
project about this too. As anyone else, we will get some of it anyway, so
maybe better hop ahead of the curve rather than react to whatever happens
and leave it all to chance...

  For good or bad, want it or not, those machine tools are upon us. Humans
should still be the responsible ones.

  I've updated the GitHub PR template with a request to responsibly
disclose the use of AI and similar tools, per
https://github.com/networkupstools/nut/commit/e62f741b5c805e1fbf17c586d625ed87efae0abb
-
at least it would help us gauge how well they fare and if they bring more
benefit or suffering.

  I've also added an issue/PR label "AI"
https://github.com/networkupstools/nut/issues?q=state%3Aopen%20label%3AAI
to mark such contributions; there are already a few known cases, including
a PR for a new SNMP subdriver being effectively co-written by Gemini (as
the end user is not a technical person and for some reason can't run the
scripts and iterate the build, apparently - so fed our instructions, repo,
an snmpwalk output and vendor MIB into the machine and it spits out a
relatively usable mix of hallucinations and code), with AI output being
reasonably useful as a starting point even though it apparently never tried
to compile what it wrote. At least once this is an interesting exercise to
see the workings of an alien mind ;) and is not much different from walking
a junior/wannabe developer through the paces to becoming a contributor, and
ultimately whichever way a decent-quality PR comes, it makes the project
better (more devices supported).

Jim Klimov

On Mon, Jan 12, 2026 at 3:56 PM Jim Klimov <jimklimov+nut at gmail.com> wrote:

> FWIW, I've now pushed out the designs used in my shirt at
> https://github.com/networkupstools/nut-swag.git
> Hoping to make some stickers too...
>
> Jim
>
>
> On Sat, Jan 10, 2026 at 11:35 PM Jim Klimov <jimklimov+nut at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Cheers,
>>
>>   are any of you planning to go to FOSDEM this year?
>>
>>   I'll be in Brussels Thu 30.1. till Sun 1.2., hoping to meet some
>> Sun/illumos/Jenkins/OpenCollective folks there. And it would be great to
>> see NUT birds of feather too! Plan to have a NUT hoodie so you can find me
>> (plan to post the design so you can print your own shirt soon).
>>
>> Jim
>>
>>
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