"Maddog's presentation was excellent," said Brian C. Lane. "I really like the approach he takes to introducing open source to people who have traditionally depended on closed solutions."
"He did a great job of spelling out the business case for GNU/Linux," said Gregory Rehm.
"It rated well against Apachecon 2001, where Hall was the keynote speaker also," said Python presenter, Derek Simkowiak.
Most of the lectures were standing room only. Simkowiak attributed this to a high people per lecture ratio at the event.
"I don't think any of us were expecting to get this ... headcount," said Michael Dodd, an event organizer. "It wouldn't have happened without the support of all the organizations and individuals involved."
Linuxfest Northwest 2003 was the fourth event organized by the Bellingham Linux User's Group. Last year, the event also hosted at Bellingham Technical College had few hundred in attendance, and over 20 demonstration and vendor booths and six lectures.
This year's event was organized by various volunteers, including the Bellingham, Kitsap Peninsula, Seattle, and Tacoma Linux Users Groups. Around 40 exhibits and 30 lectures were provided by groups, individuals, and companies around the Pacific Northwest.
"From the beginning our main focus was bringing together the different LUG's from around Washington state to show off a little of the cool things that Linux can do," said Dodd. "And I think we fulfilled that mission admirably."
"Nobody got any money for running or participating in the fest -- not even the speakers," said Rehm. "Everything was volunteer." Raffle tickets and other fund-raising was used to pay for the various expenses.
Ted Mittelstaedt, who helped at a BSD advocacy booth which answered questions about the BSD operating systems and handed out many CDs and DVDs, said he was cheered that people were donating money (for the BSD projects).
One of the unconscious biases that many Installed Software Vendors have against porting to open source is that the open source market is full of people that are just looking for something for nothing and won't pay a dime for anything, said Mittelstaedt, who is the author of The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide. So they prefer to stay in the commercial market, assuming that people are going to pay for their software too.
"If they knew that people were donating money this would help break down that preconception, and they might consider supporting open source," he said.
David Smead of Ample Power was able to share at the event that "[they] use Linux, not because it's free, but because it's the best way to do the work we need to do to make a living."
"We enjoyed showing many fest-goers how our two companies use Linux to produce books, manuals, schematics, printed circuit boards, and microcomputer code," Smead said.
Simkowiak said the volunteers showing cool projects, technologies, and free software, without trying to sell you anything, really made the event interesting, fun, and community-centric. "Many pay-for conferences I've been to are so business-like that they are without passion," he said.
"This year there was a larger amount of commercial displays than we expected, and we were a little concerned that it would impact the spirit of the event," said Dodd. "We're all pretty happy that it didn't happen that way. The hobbyist and demo exhibits seem to be just as popular as the commercial displays."
For example, Puget Sound Technology's booth had a demo computer running KDE, Everybuddy, OpenOffice.org, and GQmpeg (on their OS) showing that open source operating systems are easy and friendly to use.
"The open source attitude was clearly evident -- the event had a great vibe," said Rehm, who was the site liason. "Also, not much [Microsoft] bashing to bring it down. It stood on its own."
"Unlike most corporate or technical conferences, Linuxfest operated in the open source spirit," said Brian Hatch, author of Hacking Linux Exposed and a presenter at the event. "The presentations were often more like discussions between peers, instead of unidirectional information flow."
"Everyone was able to learn from each other in this community of sharing," he said.
"No one can say that the people behind Linux are not professional," said Jay Scherrer. "This event proves it."