"Each year it seems that there are more and more grumblings about how commercial Open Source conferences are moving further and further away from Free Software and Open Source communities. Incongruously, some of the loudest (or at least most noticed) complaining comes from some of the most consistent participants on the conference circuit. I myself have joined in the guilty pleasure of kvetching about how this year's iteration of a given conference just doesn't have the same soul as some previous year.
"I got talking about this very topic with Allison Randal when we were both at the SCALE 6x conference in Los Angeles at the beginning of this year. Many of you reading this blog know Allison either personally, or through her work on Perl, as the architect of Parrot or in her role as the co-chair of OSCON..."
