Starting tomorrow, October 7, the Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2026 opens in Prague, running through October 9 at the Prague Congress Centre. The timing isn't coincidental — this year marks Linux's 35th anniversary, and the Linux Foundation has designed the event around that milestone.
Linus Torvalds in Prague
The centerpiece is a featured conversation with Linus Torvalds, creator of both Linux and Git. Torvalds has been a fixture at Open Source Summit Europe for years, but the 35th anniversary framing gives this year's conversation added weight. Expect questions about where Linux goes from here — particularly as AI workloads increasingly run on Linux infrastructure, and as concerns about LLM-generated code contaminating open source projects have become a live debate in the community.
That second point is no abstraction right now. Last week, System76 publicly banned LLM-generated code from COSMIC Desktop contributions, citing quality and legal concerns. And separately, the PS5 Linux maintainer cited a flood of unreviewed AI-generated pull requests as a reason for stepping back from the project. Torvalds has strong opinions on code quality; his take will likely be the most-shared sound bite from the event.
Session Tracks
Beyond the keynote, the schedule covers open AI and data infrastructure, digital trust, safety-critical embedded Linux, cloud-native orchestration, and a dedicated Embedded Linux Conference track for systems developers working on hardware. The Linux Foundation has been pushing the "open AI" framing hard — positioning open models and open infrastructure as counterweights to centralized AI development.
Several satellite events run alongside the main summit: the Observability Summit Europe ran October 5, the Linux Foundation Member European Forum is today (October 6), and the Valkey Contributor Summit — focused on the Redis fork that emerged after Redis changed its license — also runs today.
Linux at 35
Linux 1.0 shipped in March 1994, but Torvalds announced the project on August 25, 1991 with his famous Usenet post. Depending on how you count, the kernel is either 32 or 35 years old — the community has settled on 35. The codebase that Torvalds called "just a hobby, won't be big and professional" now powers most of the world's servers, all Android devices, the majority of cloud infrastructure, and increasingly, the AI training hardware that defines where computing goes next.
The Prague summit runs October 7–9. The Linux Foundation is livestreaming select keynotes for those who can't attend in person.