Legacy
Twenty-five-plus years of Bellingham's own Linux & open source fest — the people, the events, and the community behind it.
Twenty-five-plus years of Bellingham's own Linux & open source fest — the people, the events, and the community behind it.
LinuxFest Northwest began in 2000 as “Linux Fest 2000,” a free, one-day, mostly local event organized by the Bellingham Linux Users Group (BLUG) at Bellingham Technical College (BTC) — which has donated its facilities for the fest's entire run since. Ken Russell organized that first fest, and Jakob Perry and John Blanford were both there volunteering from day one. Jakob stayed on as an organizer until around 2018; John is still involved today. By 2003 the event had been renamed “LinuxFest Northwest,” grown into a regional, multi-LUG gathering drawing attendees from as far as Seattle, Tacoma, and Vancouver, B.C., and was keynoted by Jon “maddog” Hall, who has kept returning to speak across the decades since.
In 2006–2007 the fest expanded from a single Saturday into the two-day weekend format it still runs today. It kept growing from there: by 2013 it had outgrown its original building and moved into a newer, larger one at BTC; 2014 remains the best-documented early year, with roughly 1,500 attendees and 120 BTC student volunteers keeping things running. In 2019, on its 20th anniversary, the fest's logo was redesigned, moving from a totem-pole motif to the Pacific Northwest landscape illustration used since.
Like most in-person events, 2021 was cancelled outright and 2020 & 2022 moved online due to COVID-19, and the 2023 fest was postponed after BTC closed for emergency repairs, running instead as a scaled-down “MiniFest” weekend. The fest bounced back in 2024 with System76 debuting its COSMIC desktop to an overflow room, and celebrated “25 Years of Community Excellence” in 2025. LinuxFest Northwest is co-produced today by BLUG, the Bellingham Technical College IT Department, Cascade STEAM, and Jupiter Broadcasting.
The fest lost one of its own in 2026: James Mason (“bear454”), a longtime SUSE contributor and LFNW board president since around 2018, who the community credits as one of the reasons the fest continued through and after the pandemic.
Over 25-plus years, LFNW has drawn a long list of well-known open-source names to Bellingham — a few who've stood out:
See the Events Archive for the full year-by-year rundown, and Board Members and Volunteers for the people who've run the fest itself.
Sources: Wikipedia, Wikidata, BLUG, and the sourcing on the Events Archive and Board Members pages.