The folks at ATO said goodbye last week, but today they served up another helping of videos, photos, stats, and swag.
On Saturday I warned you that I still wasn’t through writing about All Things Open 2026 yet, and I’m back today to prove it. Today Todd Lewis and the ATO team dropped a treasure trove of information — and some goodies — all centered around this year’s event.
We’ll start with the information, which is mainly numbers, to get those out of the way before we move on to more colorful stuff.
How Many and Where From?
Part of what dropped today was All Things Open’s annual infographic, which tells us that this year there were 5,897 registrations, which is about par but down a bit from recent years, perhaps because this year the conference launched with a new format. I’m figuring this doesn’t represent a trend and expect next year’s attendance to be back up in the 6,500 plus range.
Any way you look at them, those registrations are plenty impressive, however. They represent people from 37 countries and 39 states (what? not all 50?). Another little tidbit (likely added to sell vendor booth space — nothing wrong with that), 42.9% of the attendees have an influence over their company’s purchasing decisions. Registrants also received some ATO 2026 branded swag: handed out were more than 1,000 t-shirts (the days seem to be gone when registrants got a shirt with the cost of admission), 350 posters, and 1,500 bags (I got a t-shirt, but must’ve arrived too late for a poster and bag).
More figures (which is good, in case you ever find yourself playing a game of ATO Trivia Pursuit): most attendees either worked for small companies with 0-100 employees (42%, and I’m raising my hand here), or Fortune 100-size outfits with 10,000 plus employees (28.5%). Vendors should be happy, since badge QR codes were scanned 18,194 times (meaning they collected a lot of leads) and Tuesday’s livestreams of the keynotes, lightning talks, and Developer 1 track sessions resulted in 213,555 views, and people sitting at home watched them for 3,992 hours.
Wanna Watch What You Didn’t Attend?
There are videos rolling out. Right now, three recordings are live on ATO’s YouTube channel, with a much bigger drop promised soon. This means, if you were at the event and missed a presentation due to a scheduling conflict, you might not be as SOL as you thought. If it was recorded, you’ll be able to see it in reruns (to use a metaphor from TV’s golden age). If you didn’t go to ATO at all, then you’re definitely not as SOL as you thought. Need I say more?
So what videos are currently up? How about:
- Sunday’s pre-event “Welcome Social” panel discussion featuring Dana Fine, open source and developer relations manager for Qodo; Wallon Walusayi, head of solutions engineering at Qodo; Ruth Suehle, president of Apache Software Foundation; Guy Martin, director of open source and standards at Nvidia; and Nithya Ruff, board chair for Linux Foundation.
- The Last Software Engineer: The One Skill AI Agents Can’t Replace, Kent C. Dodds’ (Kent C. Dodds Tech LLC) keynote address from Monday, October 19.
- The Human Is the Loop: Why Open Source Matters More than Ever in an AI World, Matt Asay’s (VP of developer relations at Oracle) keynote address, also from Monday, October 19.
I was up front and close for the two keynotes. However, I missed Sunday’s panel discussion. I had intended to be there, but traffic issues caused by a combination of the NC State Fair and the Duke/Carolina game turned the normally two-hour car trip from my house into a four-hour stop-and-go ordeal, so the social was long over by the time I got to Raleigh.
A Len’s Eye View of ATO
If you know ATO, then you already know that since the beginning the conference has always had professional photographers on hand to document the event in high-quality still images. At some point after the event, all of these photos — and there are hundreds of them each year — are uploaded to the event’s Flickr account where they become publicly available.
It usually takes a while after the show for that to happen, but with today’s drop — they’re calling it “0.1 Sneak Peek Images” — they’ve given us a taste of what’s to come. By my count, there are 20 shots being made available, or a little over half a roll’s worth if we were still in the days when cameras required film. The photos in this article are from this “sneak peek,” BTW.
But Wait! There’s More…
In addition, today’s drop included a link for subscribing to the We Love Open Source weekly podcast (I wonder if it’s available through AntennaPod, which is how I subscribe and listen to podcasts — being an old radio person, I don’t care much for the video side of podcasts).
There’s also a Virtual Swag Bag, where you can sign up for some free stuff from ATO sponsors, as well as a notification that the next free ATO Meetup will be held on November 10, with a speaker “to be announced.” As soon as it’s announced, we’ll get it up on our Calendar of Open Source Events, and link to it here.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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