Events

Theme: “25 Years of Community Excellence” — the fest's 25th anniversary.

Sponsors: ~30 named organizations across five tiers. Title: CIQ; Partners: Bellingham Technical College, Cascade STEAM, Jupiter Broadcasting; Bronze: Framework Computer, AlmaLinux, System76, Candela Technologies, The Calyx Institute, VictoriaMetrics, LPI; plus a Services tier and ~16 Community sponsors.

Highlights: Keynotes by Donald Becker (“How Linux Conquered Supercomputing”) and Jon “maddog” Hall; a talk by Clyde Ford on John Stanley Ford, the first Black software engineer; LPI's own 25th anniversary coincided with LFNW's. Held April 25–27, 2025 at BTC.

Sources: 2025.lfnw.org, LPI recap.

First full-format fest since the 2023 postponement, pulled together on short notice — System76 debuted its COSMIC desktop to an overflow room.

Sponsors: Title: Tailscale; Gold: AlmaLinux; Silver: Candela Technologies; Bronze: Grafana Labs, SigLens, Calyx Institute; plus Party and Community/Support tiers (Rocky Linux, FSF, POP!_OS, US PostgreSQL Association, and others).

Highlights: Held across three smaller buildings (the main hall was still closed for repairs) through a rainy weekend; Stephen Smith's RISC-V talk hit fire-marshal capacity; Scott Dowdle ran a MiSTer FPGA lab.

Sources: System76 recap, attendee recap.

Postponed after Bellingham Technical College closed for emergency repairs — ran as a scaled-down MiniFest weekend instead of the full fest.

Sponsors: Partners: Bellingham Technical College, Jupiter Broadcasting; Gold: openSUSE; plus a Community & Support tier (Fly Paper Graphics, Matomo, SeaGL).

Highlights: Ran Oct 20–21, 2023 at the Bellingham Public Library instead of the usual BTC weekend — Friday game night, Saturday single-track sessions (Clonezilla, packet capture, Nextcloud), opening remarks from Jupiter Broadcasting's Chris Fisher rather than a traditional keynote.

Sources: postponement notice, MiniFest announcement.

Held virtual via BigBlueButton amid COVID-19 — sessions from Elastic, Mojang Studios/Microsoft, and LPI, recorded to YouTube.

Sponsors: Heritage tier: AWS, Candela Technologies, Crowd Supply, Elastic, Fedora Project, MySQL, openSUSE, Pogo Linux, System76, Vivio Technologies, YottaDB; plus a Community & Support tier.

Highlights: Kyle Rankin, “Snitching on Apps That Snitch On You”; Jon “maddog” Hall, “How To Get a Free Computer Education”; Aaron Woodward (Mojang Studios/Microsoft), “Code Quality Through Collaboration”. Run on BigBlueButton + Wonder.me.

Sources: archived event page.

Cancelled outright due to COVID-19 — the only year with no fest at all, before or since.

The organizers cited “an abundance of caution” and offered refunds/rollovers to sponsors and supporters. No replacement event, virtual or otherwise, was held.

Sources: cancellation notice.

Held virtual (BigBlueButton + Wonder) rather than cancelled — sessions remain archived on YouTube.

Sponsors: Title: Elastic; Gold: AWS, MySQL, openSUSE, System76, Vivio Technologies; Silver: Candela Technologies, Crowd Supply, Pogo Linux, Prgmr.com, Fedora Project, ThinkPenguin, YottaDB.

Highlights: Ran as a rolling video release, April 24–May 10, 2020, with live BigBlueButton/Wonder Q&A. Sessions included Allan Jude, “ELI5: ZFS Caching”, and Joel Lord (Red Hat), “Kube Restaurant”.

Sources: archived event page.

20th-anniversary theme “Past, Present & Future” — the year the totem-pole logo gave way to today's Pacific Northwest landscape mark.

Sponsors: Title: Elastic; Gold (9): AWS, Linode, Linux Academy, Microsoft, MySQL, openSUSE, System76, TAG, Vivio Technologies; Silver (9, incl. Fedora Project, Redfin, wolfSSL); Canonical sponsored lanyards.

Attendance: Reportedly over 1,200, with 84 speakers, per a single attendee's contemporary trip report — not independently confirmed elsewhere.

Highlights: Jon “maddog” Hall, “Fifty Years of Unix, Internet and more”; Kyle Rankin on UEFI/Coreboot security; John Sullivan (FSF), “Just don't buy it”; a Jupiter Broadcasting BBQ drew 300+ people, with attendees reportedly traveling from as far as the UK.

Sources: attendee recap, Jupiter Broadcasting recap, FreeBSD Foundation trip report.

System76 debuted Pop!_OS at this fest, alongside sessions from Nextcloud, the EFF, and the Software Freedom Conservancy.

Sponsors: Title: Bellingham Technical College; Gold (6): MySQL, openSUSE, System76, Silicon Mechanics, AI², Linode; Silver (6, incl. Candela Technologies, Pogo Linux, Think Penguin).

Highlights: Also Pop!_OS's debut year for System76; Seth David Schoen (EFF); a civic-hacking talk from Crimson Vista's Carrie Maxwell. Attendee/volunteer counts not documented anywhere found.

Sources: Fedora Project wiki, System76 retrospective.

Roughly 50 sponsors and community tables — Apache Software Foundation co-founder Jim Jagielski was slated to speak.

Sponsors: ~50 entries across tiers. Title: MailChimp; 10' Booth (8): Integra, Resin.io, System76, Fedora, openSUSE, Black Duck Software, MySQL, BTC; plus a large Community tier (~29 groups, incl. LOPSA, Clonezilla Project, Software Freedom Conservancy, FreeBSD Project, SeaGL) and Media sponsors (Jupiter Broadcasting, Linux Journal).

Highlights: Held May 6–7, 2017. Jim Jagielski (Apache Software Foundation co-founder) was slated for two talks; Michael Dexter, “Three Generations of FreeNAS”; Ryan Sipes (System76) spoke on running an independent Linux hardware vendor; a standout session, “All Ages: How to Build a Movement”, on FOSS community diversity. Attendee/volunteer counts not documented.

Sources: archived event page, SUSE recap.

Almost 2,000 attendees — Google's Brad Fitzpatrick (creator of memcached) spoke on Camlistore.

Sponsors: Title: Palamida Inc.; 10' Booth sponsors (10): Amazon, Sysdig, System76, StackIQ, PostgreSQL/US, Demonware, 2ndQuadrant, Fedora, Vivio, openSUSE.

Attendance: “Almost 2,000”, per an exhibitor's contemporary recap — the fest's own sponsor tier for this year wasn't fully preserved, so this list may be incomplete.

Highlights: Bradley M. Kuhn (Software Freedom Conservancy), “Help! Which Software License Should I Pick?”; Seth Schoen (EFF) on Let's Encrypt's first half-million certificates; Dru Lavigne (FreeBSD Foundation), “Doc Like an Egyptian”, drew a standing-room crowd.

Sources: iXsystems recap (via Wayback Machine), archived event page.

Roughly 80 presentations and 45 exhibitor booths — Seth Schoen covered the newly launched Let's Encrypt.

Attendance: Reportedly 1,850, per a Linux Journal event listing — single-sourced, sponsor list for this year wasn't preserved in the archive.

Highlights: Ten tracks including Privacy & Security, Open Source Hardware, and F/OSS Legal Issues; Seth Schoen (EFF), “Let's Encrypt: A Free Robotic Certificate Authority”; Federico Lucifredi (Red Hat), Ceph overview.

Sources: archived event page, Fedora Project wiki, FOSS Force preview.

The best-documented early year — roughly 1,500 attendees and 120 student volunteers, plus a Tesla-coil after-party.

Sponsors: ~48 identified, tiered Gold/Silver/Bronze/Media/Community Supporter (top tier $2,000); named sponsors include Microsoft, Red Hat, Mozilla, the Xen Project, the EFF, and Pogo Linux.

Attendance: 1,150 badges reported on day one, 1,380 total registered, ~1,500 by the organizers' final estimate — per a contemporary Slashdot report, the best-sourced attendance figure found for any year before 2015.

Volunteers: Roughly 120 student volunteers from BTC's CNET program — the only pre-2015 year with a real volunteer count. Longtime organizer Jakob Perry has volunteered since age 15, back at the very first fest in 2000.

Highlights: Sessions on IPv6, UEFI (“The Great Satan and You”), and Mobile Chrome Apps; an after-party with a 9-foot Tesla coil at the American Museum of Radio & Electricity — the same venue used in 2008, suggesting a recurring tradition.

Sources: Slashdot, Network World.

“14th annual” — moved into a new BTC building for more space, with roughly 1,200–1,500 attendees.

Sponsors: ~44 identified, including GitHub, Mozilla, Rackspace, HP Cloud Services, Percona, and OpenBSD; Fedora Project was a $500 silver sponsor.

Attendance: Contemporary site copy said “join 1,200 F/OSS enthusiasts”; a later retrospective cited ~1,500 — both are reported here since they conflict and neither could be independently resolved.

Highlights: The “World Famous Raffle” (a tradition already running by 2011) and a new Android companion app for the fest.

Sources: Fedora Project wiki, Linux Journal event page.

“13th annual” — a joint ACLU/EFF panel on digital rights, roughly 1,000 attendees.

Sponsors: ~47 identified, tiered Platinum/Gold/Silver/Bronze/Media/Supporter, including 10gen/MongoDB, the Linux Foundation, O'Reilly, and USENIX.

Attendance: Pre-event materials described “about a thousand”; a later Fedora retrospective cited ~1,200 — treat the higher figure as less certain.

Highlights: Seth Schoen (EFF) and Brian Alseth (ACLU-WA) joint panel; George Dyson, “Alan Turing: The First 100 Years”.

Sources: EFF event page.

“12th annual” — Seth Schoen's HTTPS Everywhere talk, plus a side event at the Fairhaven Cruise Terminal.

Sponsors: Gold/Silver/Bronze/Media/Supporter tiers plus five named individual sponsors, including former board member James Mason. ~30 exhibitors identified (EFF, Free Software Foundation, AWS, FreeBSD, openSUSE).

Highlights: Side event “Bellingham TechNight” at the Fairhaven Cruise Terminal; Seth Schoen (EFF), “Getting HTTPS Everywhere”; the “World Famous Raffle” already an established tradition by this year. Attendee/volunteer counts not documented.

Sources: LWN, Fedora Project wiki.

“11th annual” — free, no registration required, with sessions on Fedora 13 and git.

Highlights: Fedora 13 session (Jesse Keating); a Roku/Python streaming talk (Brian Lane); a kid-friendly XO/OLPC laptop demo. Sponsor names, and attendee/volunteer counts, not documented beyond individual Fedora-booth volunteers.

Sources: Fedora Project wiki.

10th anniversary — Jon “maddog” Hall and MySQL founder Monty Widenius both spoke.

Highlights: Both the event's own materials and a Linux Magazine blog post call this the “10th Anniversary”. Jon “maddog” Hall and Monty Widenius (MySQL's creator) each gave two sessions. Sponsor names and attendee/volunteer counts not documented.

Sources: Linux Magazine.

The Saturday-night party moved to the American Museum of Radio & Electricity — a venue that returned in 2014.

Sponsors: By function rather than tier — Silicon Mechanics sponsored the Saturday party, Oracle Technology Network the music, Pogo Linux two charter buses, and Candela Technologies flew in speaker Mel Chua.

Highlights: Mel Chua (OLPC); the exhibit hall was covered by the Linux Action Show podcast. Attendee/volunteer counts not documented; full company names for the Gold/Silver sponsor tiers were lost to broken archive images.

Fest's first confirmed 2-day format — speakers included future FSF/Conservancy leader Karen Sandler.

Sponsors: BTC (host), ActiveState, Google, Oracle, Pogo Linux, Silicon Mechanics.

Highlights: Karen Sandler (later executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy) spoke on software patents; Crispin Cowan (creator of AppArmor); Karl Fogel. Attendee/volunteer counts not documented.

Last one-day format — roughly 700–800 attendees, with XML co-inventor Tim Bray speaking.

Attendance: Roughly 700–800, per a contemporary Linux.com recap.

Highlights: Tim Bray (co-inventor of XML); Greg DeKoenigsberg (Fedora); Danny O'Brien (EFF); ~60 attendees bused in from Seattle, sponsored by Pogo Linux — a recurring practice going back to at least 2004.

Sources: Linux.com.

Roughly 1,000 attendees and 40+ presentations — a grilled-salmon lunch and espresso bar were the noted extras.

Highlights: Speakers included George Dyson, Chris DiBona (Google), and Dee-Ann LeBlanc (author of “Linux for Dummies”). Sponsor names and volunteer counts not documented.

Sources: Linux Journal.

PHP creator Rasmus Lerdorf spoke, alongside a PGP/GPG keysigning party.

Sponsors: Pogo Linux sponsored a charter bus from Seattle — the earliest confirmed instance of a practice that recurred for years after.

Highlights: Rasmus Lerdorf, “PHP from the source”. Attendee/volunteer counts not documented; no post-event recap survives.

Renamed “LinuxFest Northwest” and became a regional, multi-LUG event — keynoted by Jon “maddog” Hall.

Attendance: Reportedly around 1,000, per an independent contemporary Seattle Times article; an unverified in-house estimate at the time ranged 800–1,200.

Highlights: First event organized jointly across BLUG, Tacoma LUG, Kitsap Peninsula LUG, and Greater Seattle LUG; keynote by Jon “maddog” Hall (Linux International); other speakers included Crispin Cowan (creator of StackGuard/AppArmor) and Jackson Harper (Mono/Novell); added a new K-12 education track.

Sources: Seattle Times, “Area's Linux lovers laud computing 'democracy'”, Apr 28 2003.

Keynoted by “User Friendly” comic creator Illiad — roughly 300 attendees.

Sponsors: Nine named vendors, including Northwest Computer Supply, Puget Sound Technology, and BLUG itself.

Attendance: Roughly 300, per a later Seattle Times retrospective — a retrospective figure, not a contemporary count, so treat cautiously.

Highlights: Keynotes by Illiad (creator of the “User Friendly” webcomic) and Joseph Cheek (CTO of Lycoris); tutorials on KDE, Ximian GNOME, and BSD.

Second fest — still a free, single-day event at Bellingham Technical College.

Described on BLUG's own contemporary site as a “huge hit”, with a new hands-on office-apps tutorial added versus the first year. No attendee, sponsor, or volunteer counts survive.

Founded by BLUG as “Linux Fest 2000” — a free, single-day, mostly local event.

Attendance: Self-reported as “over a hundred” on BLUG's own contemporary site.

Highlights: Hands-on demos covering networking/firewalls, desktop use, installation, and early e-commerce/gaming on Linux; organized by Ken Russell. Jakob Perry first volunteered here at age 15, staying on as a longtime organizer until around 2018 — and John Blanford was there too, making this the start of his run as one of LFNW's founding organizers, which continues today.