I've been attending the O'Reilly Open Source Convention for nearly a decade. When I first attended in 1998, it was still "Perl Conference 2.0", as it was before the whole Open Source "revolution" had started. (The 1998 Perl Conference also was a turning point for me, as it was there that I met Jeffrey Friedl who would become a very good friend and later co-worker as he helped me get interviewed by Yahoo).
The past few years, I've been managing to weasel Press passes to OSCON to avoid paying the registration fees. As conferences go, OSCON is right in line with other conferences, price-wise, but the last few years, I've always had a hard time cost-justifying attending. Certainly, one can argue that the hallway track at OSCON is great, and I'd not argue with that a bit. Probably some of the brightest minds in the Open Source software industry all congregate there for a week. But asking an employer "pay to send me for a week of hallway track" is a dicey proposition at best.
In past years, I was able to usually say things like, "I've scored a free pass to the conference, all I need is for $EMPLOYER to cover airfare, hotel, etc.," and use that to sweeten the deal. I could usually point to a few things that would be relevant and useful to our current work environment, and that would be enough to get approval to go. (Although, in some years, I've even had to sweeten it further by saying things like, "and I'll split the cost of the hotel with a friend of mine, who is also going").
Last year, though, I found myself wandering around sort of aimlessly for a good portion of the conference. It was then that I had told myself, "That's it, it's just not worth it. I can't even really cost-justify it any more."
This winter, though, when the CFP went out, I began to have second thoughts. I thought to myself, "Well, maybe if you give a talk there on something, maybe then it would be worth it, because it would give you exposure, and it would give $EMPLOYER exposure as someone who hires smart people who give talks, etc., etc.," and all that would -- in the end -- cost-justify the important part of the conference for me: the hallway track.
But, I learned that my talk proposal was declined. I won't go into the whole argument about how the reasons why it was declined were silly, nor any of the many failings I think OSCON is suffering. As I told Nat Torkington (program chair), OSCON is going into its tenth year this year, so clearly they've got an idea of "what works", and it's putting asses in the seats for them. Mine simply won't be one of them.
Which makes me sad, because while I infinitely value more a conference like LISA, I am still a generalist. Yes, I'm a System Administrator, but I also do Perl programming, and I am also a MySQL DBA, and I also deploy a myriad of open source tools at work every day. OSCON should, near as I can tell from the marketing speak, be aimed directly at me, and it doesn't seem to be any more. Nor does it seem to be targeted at any newcomers to any of those things -- gone are "Learning Perl" type one-day tutorials, or introductions to MySQL, or any of a hundred other things which might at least leave me thinking "oh, well I outgrew OSCON" or something like that. There's very little for the "newbies" that I can see (at least in past programs), and very little for people who aren't interested in seeing niche case-studies ("Explaining Explain"? "The Semasiology of Open Source"?) Unless you're an actual hard-core Open Source developer, it has little value, where once upon a time it had a lot of value as well to Open Source users.
Hmmm, I guess I did sorta "Get into the whole argument" ... sorry 'bout that. I lied.
But, anyhow, looks like my jam-packed three-weeks-of-hell-in-a-row thing is now alleviated. OSCON won't be happening, and the NetApp training is probably going to happen at a different time, so now we're all back to something resembling normality.
I've been to all the Perl Conferences, so I still go. Also, looks like most of the specialty conferences have died (bsdcon, apachecon), so oscon is it. Having said that, I do get a sense of deja vu at oscon these days, because I have often seen it all before. As a developer, I still get enough out of it to make it worthwhile though.
just curious to know what your proposed talk was about.
It was going to be a case study of how "poor implementation of open source code" can lead to management "no-confidence" votes in open source software in general. In other words, if you implement, say, sendmail, in a brain-dead fashion, you may convince management that "sendmail is bad" or even worse "that open source software is bad."
I'm sorry to hear you won't be there, Derek! I was hoping I might finally meet you (I'm speaking).
I personally won't be at OSCON this year either... triple-booked scheduling conflict, and OSCON loses (as the third option of three).
I've continued to propose for many years the kinds of tutorials you remember at early OSCONs... basic Perl object, even Learning Perl. No, never a taker. We submitted 15 Perl-related proposals and tutorials last year, and the only talk accepted was on the "General" track... not on the Perl track. That's a bit surprising for the most published Perl author in the world. How sad.
I submitted 3 talks last year, and only one was sort-of accepted: they put me on a panel with others about high availability. My employer was willing to pay for me to go for the whole time, but I went for only the afternoon of my panel. Why? Because nearly all the rest of the sessions were worthless to me, as a MySQL user.
They stripped basically all of the MySQL content out from the conference since O'Reilly is managing the MySQL UC.
When the CFP came out this year, I went through the same exercise as you: Do I really want to go this year? Is it worth my time to go up there for one afternoon, assuming they accept one of my talks? Nope. Not going this year either.