Open Source on BeLibre - Belgian independent knowledge and policy platform

BeLibre Leak Detector: What your website tells strangers about your visitors

Jurgen Gaeremyn — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 21:00:00 +0100

You visit one website and around ten companies hear about it, several of them outside Europe. BeLibre’s Leak Detector records a real browsing session and shows you exactly who received what about your visit, and what that means under European law.

FOSS just passed Mythos' stress test

Jurgen Gaeremyn — Fri, 15 May 2026 11:00:00 +0100

TL;DR: In April, Anthropic announced an AI model called Mythos that had reportedly found thousands of serious security bugs in every major operating system and web browser. The reaction was loud: The Bank of England warned regulators it could “crack the whole cyber risk world open”, US Treasury called in the big banks, NHS England closed all its public code repositories inside two weeks. Five weeks on, the dust has settled and the picture looks different: Independent reviewers pulled the headline numbers apart. The creator of curl, one of the most widely used open-source tools in the world, ran the Mythos report against his own code and found it had identified one minor flaw, calling the hype “primarily marketing”. 99% of Mythos’s claimed findings remain unpublished and unverified. What did happen in those five weeks is that the open-source world fixed and disclosed its share of the bugs publicly, in the open, on commit logs anyone can read. That is open source working as it is supposed to, so don’t call open-source a liability. The lesson for our administrations is the opposite of NHS England’s. Closing your code does not make you safer. Funding the open ecosystem you already depend on, and using similar AI tools defensively on your own code, does.

How DOSBA came to be

Bram Buijs — Wed, 06 May 2026 10:00:00 +0100

Bram Buijs, board member of the Dutch Open Source Business Alliance, is joining the BeLibre meetup to tell us how DOSBA brought in 42 members in a single year and joined the European umbrella organisation APELL.

It’s a story spanning more than a quarter century of trial and error: DOSBA is the fourth Dutch attempt at organising the open source business sector. The first dates back to 1999. Why did the three predecessors fail, and why is DOSBA succeeding?

Schleswig-Holstein knows what it wants. That alone is a revolution

Thomas Desmedt — Sat, 02 May 2026 11:00:00 +0100

This guest contribution was reposted from LinkedIn and translated with the author’s permission.

I read the FT article somewhere between two meetings. And I had to stop for a moment.

Not because it was so impressive. But because it was so rare. A government saying what it wants, why it wants it, and then simply… starting.

“The important thing is that we become independent from centralised, monopolistic providers. That is what we are striving for, step by step.”

From pioneering to scaling up

Katrien Bernaerts — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 14:00:00 +0100

# Meetup, 7 May 2026

Katrien Bernaerts will be speaking with us at the BeLibre meetup. Anyone attending is welcome to join the presentation.

# Topic

What grew quietly for years is now genuinely picking up pace.

Since 2012, we’ve been taking the first steps towards open digital learning with Xerte, reinforced by H5P from 2015 onwards.

Digisprong is looking for partners for an open source procurement in Flemish education

Jurgen Gaeremyn — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Kenniscentrum Digisprong published a public procurement in early April 2026 that is worth reading carefully. Not because public procurements are generally compelling reading, but because this one explicitly asks for open source expertise, didactic depth and knowledge of digital sovereignty. Budget: up to 700,000 euros. Deadline for tenders: 1 June 2026. Information session: 5 May 2026.

For anyone who wants to know the background of Digisprong: read our earlier article first. The short version: the Flemish government has spent five years quietly building an open source learning infrastructure for its two million people in education, and is now taking that to the next level by making open source the content theme of its professional development as well.

A Belgian tool is quietly running medical imaging worldwide

Jurgen Gaeremyn — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Somewhere in a place you have never heard of - in a hospital in rural Senegal, a clinic in Peru or a radiology department in the heart of Brussels - a doctor is looking at a medical scan. There is a reasonable chance that scan is being served by software built in Liège.

Orthanc is a free, open-source DICOM server for medical imaging. It was initiated in 2011 by Sébastien Jodogne at the University Hospital of Liège, with its first public release on July 19, 2012. Since then it has become one of the most widely deployed medical imaging tools in the world, running in hospitals, research institutions, and clinics across dozens of countries. The Orthanc Team, a Belgian consultancy run by Alain Mazy and Benoît Crickboom, handles community support, plugin development, and deployment for hospitals and software companies worldwide. Sébastien Jodogne continues development from his research lab at UCLouvain. They deliberately keep it small: focused on development and documentation, without the overhead of enterprise support contracts and shareholder obligations.

Five years of Digisprong: how the Flemish government quietly built an open digital learning infrastructure and is now shifting into a higher gear

Jurgen Gaeremyn — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For the past five years, the Flemish government has been quietly building an open digital learning infrastructure for its two million people in education: on open source, on European servers, with public money. This article tells the story of how it grew, why it matters, and what the new Digisprong procurement adds to it.

It was the summer of 2014. In schools across Flanders, teachers sat behind their computers, armed with export buttons and download files, trying to salvage what they could. EloV, the electronic learning environment that the VVKSO had been offering to more than 140 Catholic secondary schools since 2005, was taken offline on 1 September for good. The Blackboard licence had become too expensive. The collaboration with KU Leuven was over. That was that.

The pigeon that flew back: how Belgium quietly chose open source messaging

Emma, Jurgen Gaeremyn — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Imagine: the year is 1914. Somewhere on the Western Front, a small pigeon is released with a message tied to its leg. It doesn’t know why. It doesn’t know for whom. It simply flies - reliable, unseen, tireless - and delivers the message.

For centuries, the pigeon was the gold standard of secure communication. No wires to tap. No central server to hack. Decentralised by nature. And surprisingly hard to intercept.

If FIFA can do it, so can we

Jurgen Gaeremyn — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 21:00:00 +0100

We’re here live from the cafeteria, for the announcement of the BeLibre world soccer champion!

Last week, the international soccer federation showed us once again how awards work these days. After the big boss felt slighted, FIFA pulled a few feathers out of its ass and delivered them with a deep bow. They created the brand new “FIFA Peace Prize,” specially awarded during the 2026 World Cup draw.

BeLibre Sovereignty Map

Mon, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Interactive map where you can discover digital sovereignty in municipalities, schools, emergency services or other critical infrastructure in our country and beyond.