Community One 2009, Now With Less of That Pesky Community

Before I go too far, let me disclose that I submitted a talk for CommunityOne designed to cover some of the tools we’ve open-sourced that combine Postgres with various parts of Solaris (like dtrace and zfs), which was turned down. Now, I’m willing to accept that my talk didn’t fit the theme of the event or that Sun didn’t find me to be a compelling speaker, or maybe they would just rather forget about Postgres in general; it happens, no big deal. But what I do have to take issue with is roster of talks that is chock full of Sun employees at an event called “Community One”. Looking at the released list of sessions, I get 24 of the 31 talks being given by Sun employees; that’s over 75%! If you want your conference to be about community, you need to have some actual community members involved. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by this from a company that thought it could buy itself an open source database community, but last years line up wasn’t nearly this Sun heavy. Not to mention the recent flack from the MySQL conference being so weighted toward MySQL employees. Is anyone at Sun paying attention? I suspect they have met the internet, but they seem to be two steps back on meeting the open source community. So, not sure I will be attending CommunityOne this year. It is just a train ride up north, so there is still an outside chance, but that lack of community in this community conference is uninspiring (I suppose if I want community inspiration, I should be looking at Open Source Bridge), but I’d love to hear from others if they are going.