[PLUG] O'Reilly Open Source Convention "Locals Only" UG Discount (fwd)

Paul Heinlein heinlein at madboa.com
Fri May 14 06:27:03 UTC 2004


On Wed, 12 May 2004, Alex Daniloff wrote:

>> So, yeah, O'Reilly, the speakers, and the hotel are all making 
>> money on this thing. Does that really call into question the 
>> integrity of O'Reilly publications? Do *you* work for free?
>
> First of all - Have you ever seen a vendor who charges potential 
> customers for demonstration of his products? Have you ever seen a 
> car dealer who ask you to pay for a test drive? Why don't you pay 
> for every sales pitch?

I'm not following you here. I've only attended two O'Reilly 
conferences (1999 in Monterey, and last year here in Portland), but I 
wouldn't characterize the sessions as demos or sales pitches. Some 
speakers were better than others, of course, but none of them used 
their presentation time to sell a book.

> All this fluff and bluff like five star hotels and speakers are the 
> vendor's business expenses not his customers'.

Anyone who'd confuse the Portland Mariott with a five-star hotel 
either has not visited a five-star hotel or owns stock in Mariott. :-)

Seriously, however, the argument about expenses was mine, not 
O'Reilly's. I was just trying to point out that there are plenty of 
legitimate expenses to consider when evaluating the price of a 
conference.

Admittedly, business-oriented technical conferences aren't cheap. 
SANS, LISA, and the rest of them are out of my budget reach. I wish it 
weren't so, but I'm not going to call O'Reilly's reputation into 
question for trying to compete in that marketplace.

-- Paul Heinlein <heinlein at madboa.com>




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