SustainOSS - AI, FLOSS, and Sustainability Virtual Forum
It is impossible to argue against the assertion that AI is having profound impacts on many aspects of free, libre and open source software projects, communities and ecosystem.
If you have interest in exploring how AI in all its various and rapidly evolving forms is impacting FLOSS software and all those who work on the same, we invite you to join us for the next SustainOSS Virtual Forum on Thursday 11 June 2026.
At this SustainOSS Virtual Forum on AI, FLOSS, and Sustainability, we will survey the challenges, evolution, and opportunities emerging from the ever-expanding role of AI in software engineering, community management, project governance and, most importantly, the sustainability of our shared FLOSS universe. Specific topics to be addressed on the agenda will be identified in collaboration with confirmed participants.
We invite you to share your experiences, ideas, and concerns around the roles and impacts of AI in our rapidly changing ecosystems. across various scales, engage in respectful discussion, and envision goals and partnerships we can collectively embrace to sustain our open-source ecosystems.
Topics likely to be explored
What makes sense to delegate to AI, and where do humans need to stay fundamentally centered in FLOSS efforts?
Generative AI contributions can diminish manual, iterative community collaboration and learning, potentially undermining trust and cooperative development culture in OSS. How can we keep FLOSS communities vibrant, engaged and relevant, while continuing to provide on-ramps and other opportunities for new and less experienced practitioners to participate?
How should we model the positive and negative impacts of AI-generated code to minimize both adverse impacts on codebase quality and prevent additional burden on OSS maintainers?
What are the risks of AI-generated code? What are the risks of AI models surfacing vulnerabilities faster than maintainers can resolve and patch? From deprecated dependencies to hardcoded secrets, can AI ever play a role in making software supply chains more resilient? What are best practices for leveraging AI to make code, integration and maintenance more secure rather than less?
AI tools trained on open source code with diverse licenses may generate code snippets that violate license terms, especially copyleft licenses such as GPL. Emerging “clean room” applications of generative models strip FLOSS code bases of their licensing by reverse-engineering libraries and tools. Who is making the best sense of these legal ambiguities and compliance challenges for OSS projects that must ensure code legality, and what do we all need to be learning?
Over-reliance on AI may cause dependency issues and operational risks if AI tools have outages or produce errors that propagate through the system. How do we “threat model” dependence on AI tools?
Anecdotal evidence and headlines both suggest AI is negatively impacting early-career engineers. What should we be doing to make sure those newer to FLOSS communities and FLOSS projects find meaningful and fulfilling roles, and those already well along on their journeys continue to realize new levels of attainment and fulfilment?
The additional burden on maintainers to sort through AI-generated content, low-quality issues, pull requests, and other content. It used to be “slop”, but now we’re seeing just huge amounts of OK code. How do we deal with that?
How are we adjusting to AI in education, and the loss of new developers and of essential skills through the hollowing out of traditional pathways for coders into open source?
As with all SustainOSS events, the participatory and interactive agenda will be co-designed in collaboration with confirmed participants in the time leading up to the Forum.
Join us on 11 June for this SustainOSS Virtual Forum:
For questions and inquiries, email [email protected].