One of my larger complaints about Linux Foundation events is that they are very much targeted at corporations with large budgets to send people to conferences.For example, as someone who has mostly been an indie OSS maintainer over their career, I woul...
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One of my larger complaints about Linux Foundation events is that they are very much targeted at corporations with large budgets to send people to conferences.
For example, as someone who has mostly been an indie OSS maintainer over their career, I would love to go to Open Source Summit and meet up with people to discuss what problems they are having with the software I maintain and how we can collaborate on resolving those problems.
But my choices are to register as a "hobbyist" (a frankly demeaning thing to call an indie maintainer) at $249, which requires me to go ask them for a discount code (also frankly demeaning), or register at the full $949 rate, or maybe I could get the "small business" discount code which brings it down to *only* $500. Man, what a favor, huh?
I understand that putting on these events is very costly, but when indie OSS maintainers are given the option of paying nearly $1000 or having to go ask someone for a "hobbyist" discount code, it seems very disrespectful to the maintainers who are building the actual software that this summit is about.
Do you really think the guy in Nebraska who is holding up all modern digital infrastructure in his spare time has the money to spend $949 to go to a conference? For all the talking we do about building inclusive conferences, this has to include *access* for indie maintainers.
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@ariadne
To be fair, that's why we see FLOSS browser plugins be sold on the sly to a really garbage company....The sole maintainer is doing work for free, and usually abused by a few self-entitled assholes who make the maintainer question their existence.
And when someone comes by and offers $100k for full control? I mean, yeah?
(But yeah, the "Linux Foundation" is a scammy business front. Seriously, when your Linux membership is Oracle and Microsoft, you have a front.)
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@ariadne there is probably a bit of an expectation mismatch as well as LF is primarily an industry consortium representing/coordinating the interests of its corporate members. I have no problem with LF charging $1k to Samsung, MS or Google staff developers. Take whatever rate makes sense to you, whatever they label the SKU they dont have feelings about it, they're a soulless company
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@ariadne Yeah, that's a huge problem. I organize a small time local IT-sec con and we're fighting to keep tickets in the humane price range.We haven't inflation adjusted prices and sell student tickets with a 50% loss but they still climb to 1500 SEK ($150) which is a lot if you're a full time student. It sucks.
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Southern California #Linux Expo was $85 this year for 11 tracks over 4 days, and generally features a lot of the same speakers as the more expensive conferences. SCALE gets corporate devops attendees along with lower-budget projects, companies, students, and other people
http://web.archive.org/web/20240211215127/https://register.socallinuxexpo.org/reg6/
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@ariadne "I understand that putting on these events is very costly, but when indie OSS maintainers are given the option of paying nearly $1000 or having to go ask someone for a "hobbyist" discount code, it seems very disrespectful to the maintainers who are building the actual software that this summit is about."
So, is it the residual cost out of pocket, or the terminology under which those discounts are granted, which you take-issue with? I.e., if LF went with more respectful wording, would the ~75% discount off commercial-face-pricing be acceptable?
Having spent a bit of time on the Con Exec side of things (entirely unrelated convention), they're stupefyingly expensive to run, if in-person at a commercial facility. Someone has to cover the costs, either by declaring sponsorships (overt cost-shifting), or categorization (with hidden cost-shifting).
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@ariadne Open Source Bridge was an attempt to have a conference that was more community-oriented. It lasted about a decade, but never really managed to get bigger than a regional conference. The last one, in 2018, had registration on a sliding scale: $10-100, or you could register for $250 and become a sponsor. It relied a great deal on volunteer labor, though, which is one of the reasons it’s no longer around – organizer burnout is just as destructive as maintainer burnout :blobsad:
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@ariadne I don't know if this is solvable, because in addition to the conference ticket, there is travel and hosting. Local conferences do better on these metrics but I feel like we're hitting a contradiction in terms, i.e. gathering contributors from all over the globe to a central place so they can collaborate in person - that's not a local event
On top of all that, personally I think global conferences the way we do them today are an unsustainable practice. Idk if they can be fixed
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@Phyxis it is three things:
1. the cost for non-corporate attendees being $949 by default, especially when many corporate attendees have significantly discounted tickets because their corporate employer is a sponsor of LF
2. if you are an indie OSS maintainer, then you can in theory get a discount code as a “hobbyist” if you go and ask for one, this is demeaning to OSS maintainers
3. referring to private individuals who are involved in open source as maintainers as “hobbyists” is also just directly insultingbut hey, this is the same organization who issued a policy that everyone has to have a badge with their government ID name on it during COVID because it had to match their health records, despite this being harmful to transgender people and others who go by names other than their government one.
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@jpetazzo lodging and travel are more affordable when the ticket isn’t nearly 1000 USD
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@ariadne as you said - the ticket isn't 1000 USD, it's more like 300. Yes it's annoying to have to jump thru hoops to get that price - although IME this hasn't been hard. What takes (again, IME) more spoons and effort is the other hoops (take train vs plane for environmental responsibility; share a room with a friend or with a stranger, or stay farther from the venue, to drive costs down, etc.) I agree that the LF can and should do better I'm just surprised that it's your larger complaint
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@jpetazzo being a native seattlite, i do not need to travel anywhere or get a hotel room so the ticket is the only decision point in this particular case
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@ariadne ah, that sucks. I mean, it's awesome that you're a local (that's super lucky of you!), and they have scholarships for that (typically giving you a free ticket if you're an OSS maintainer and can cover your other expenses), but it's unfortunate because the deadline to apply for that scholarship has passed
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@jpetazzo yeah but all of this is silly. there shouldn’t be an application period, there should be “present your OSS maintainership credential of choice, get reduced ticket price immediately”
does not have to be zero, just not $949.