Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software

providing assistance for press to attend is less common in the FOSS world, if for no other reason than that the budgets tend to be small.

but in the commercial world, high-value give-aways are very common, even to attendees. This is a large part of the reason that many press people end up getting the reputation as shills and I believe that it's a large part of the reason that the traditional press (including many magazines) are of such poor quality.

I can't point at specifics on the commercial side, but if you read the write-ups after just about any major commercial event, it seems pretty obvious.