This Week in Open Source for January 23, 2026
A look around the world of open source
Can you believe we're already wrapping up the first month of the year? January is coming to a close. The open source ecosystem is buzzing with activity, from the upcoming community gatherings at FOSDEM in Brussels to new conversations around AI standards and cloud flexibility.
Google Open Source believes that "a community is a garden, not a building". It requires constant tending to thrive. This week, we're looking at how we can all contribute to that growth—whether it's by securing the software supply chain, standardizing AI agents, or simply learning from the legends of our field like Linus Torvalds.
Dive in to see what's happening this week in open source!
Upcoming Events
- January 29: CHAOSScon Europe 2026 is co-located with FOSDEM in Brussels, Belgium. This conference revolves around discussing open source project health, CHAOSS updates, use cases, and hands-on workshops for developers, community managers, project managers, and anyone interested in measuring open source project health. It also shares insights from the CHAOSS context working groups including OSPOs, University Open Source, and Open Source in Science and Research.
- January 31 - February 1: FOSDEM 2026 is happening at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Brussels, Belgium. It is a free event for software developers to meet, share ideas and collaborate. Every year, thousands of developers of free and open source software from all over the world gather at the event in Brussels.
- February 24 - 25: The Linux Foundation Member Summit is happening in Napa, California. It is the annual gathering for Linux Foundation members that fosters collaboration, innovation, and partnerships among the leading projects and organizations working to drive digital transformation with open source technologies.
- March 5 - 8: SCALE 23x is happening in Pasadena, California. It is North America's largest community-run open source conference and includes four days of sessions, workshops, and community activities focused on open source, security, DevOps, cloud native, and more.
- March 9 - 10: FOSSASIA Summit 2026 is happening in Bangkok, Thailand. It will be a two-day hybrid event that showcases the latest in open technologies, fostering collaboration across enterprises, developers, educators, and communities.
Open Source Reads and Links
- [Article] The state of trusted open source - This review of the state of trusted open source report goes over many statistics. One of the interesting ones is that vulnerabilities most often hide in the smaller dependencies of the larger projects we might be focused on. What does this mean for your approach to security? How should various open source communities deal with this?
- [Blog] Software Heritage Archive recognized as a digital public good - As the Software Heritage Archive celebrates its 10th anniversary, the Archive has scaled to protect over 27 billion unique source files, even solving the "2PB problem" by deploying protocols that compressed 78TB of graph data into a 3TB research dataset. This ensures that humanity's executable history remains a global commons rather than a proprietary secret, aligning with our belief at Google that Code is for today, Open Source is forever.
- [Blog] Agent Definition Language: The open standard AI agents have been missing - The Agent Definition Language (ADL) creates a clear, shared way to describe AI agents so they work well across different systems. This helps teams understand what agents do, how they behave, and how to govern them safely. As an open and standard, ADL makes AI agents easier to build, review, and share in the open-source community.
- [Blog] AI Agent Engineering in Go with the Google ADK - AI, agents, and the related protocols touch on many open source projects. This post gives you a technical hands on with the Agent Starter Pack. By following it you'll learn how to build, test, and securely deploy a Go AI agent using Google Cloud services.
- [Article] How Kubernetes Broke the AWS Cloud Monopoly - Before Kubernetes, companies felt locked into AWS because of its unique APIs. Kubernetes allowed apps to run on any cloud, giving users more choice and helping other cloud providers grow. This has made multi-cloud the way forward for many enterprises. Are you utilizing a multi-cloud strategy? Has Kubernetes helped you get there?
- [Article] Even Linux Creator Linus Torvalds is Using AI to Code in 2026 - Opinions vary on where and whether AI is useful in various areas. One place that it has shown the greatest benefit is in as a tool for writing code. It seems Linus Torvalds has started to use it to assist with part of his AudioNoise side project. What a good way to find out how best AI can work for oneself. How have you been using AI with your code?
What exciting open source events and news are you hearing about? Let us know on our @GoogleOSS X account or our new @opensource.google Bluesky account.
