Benjamin Alexander Landin 1988-2022

It is with great sadness that we reported the passing of our friend Ben Landin, who died at the the age of thirty-three after a month-long illness. His obituary has since been published by his family, prompting us to update our original notification below.

Ben was the principal maintainer of the Fort Wayne Linux Users Group website for the past five years. He also usually took the initiative for scheduling events and reserving facilities for meetings, and lent his equipment, including his projector and portable desktop, so that others could make the most effective presentations possible. Ben suggested, and was instrumental in effecting, the switch from Meetup to GetTogether for event scheduling.

Ben attended Homestead High School, The Career Academy High School at Anthis, and Ivy Tech Community College - Northeast in Fort Wayne. He was most recently employed by Silicon Mountain Technologies as a systems administrator. Ben is survived by his parents, brother, and his many other relatives and friends.

Ben enjoyed online gaming, especially Minecraft, and maintained a Minecraft server, a Discord server for his friends, and numerous other servers and websites for gaming, socializing, and sharing information about free software. He was also a Dungeons & Dragons aficionado, and a regular at former Game Annex in Fort Wayne.

Ben was a staunch supporter of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, so much so that he usually overrode the objections over other leadership team members who thought we were sharing too many EFF notices and calls-to-action. It is suggested that memorials be made to the EFF by donating here. Donations to the The Trevor Project, or the FreeBSD Foundation are also suggested.

Ben deliberately designed most systems so that others could step in and maintain the site should anything ever befall him, something we jokingly used to refer to as the “hit by a bus principle.” The group has redundant domain names, so even if one of them registered in his name can’t be recovered, the leadership team will still have access to the other. There is also shared access to the Fort Wayne LUG repository.

One exigency that was not foreseen was the loss of Ben’s participation in accessing the group’s multi-signature Bitcoin wallet. Accordingly, we have removed the Bitcoin donation address from the website until we can determine if restoring access is possible.

Visitation will be held from 4-7 PM, Thursday, February 17, 2022 at Klaehn, Fahl & Melton Funeral Home, 6424 Winchester Rd, Fort Wayne, IN 46819. A funeral service will be held at Trinity English Lutheran, 450 W. Washington Blvd Fort Wayne, IN 46802, on Friday, February 18, at 11 AM, with calling one hour prior.

On behalf of the entire Fort Wayne Linux Users Group, we offer our deepest condolences to all who knew and loved Ben.