O'Reilly shutting down its conference group

Travel bans preventing prominent people in the software industry from attending Amerocentric conferences over the past few years certainly didn't help.

> One wonders how well their book business is doing.

Given that our industry has moved from reading books to copypasting stackoverflow, probably not very well

> it sounds like you're saying "get out of the loss-leader business model".

No, I'm not. I only mentioned 1 point that relates to cost at all: "Allow speakers to publish recordings of their talks." That would have very insignificant cost impact. Speakers can basically do this already because they can record themselves doing the talk in their bedroom and publish it. All I'm saying is that speakers should be given a copy of their recording with their own copyright so they can republish it if they want. Most wouldn't bother and those that did would probably be happy to wait a few weeks or months.

Here is a reason that I suggest this: there recordings of talks given by the FSF and Software Freedom Conservancy and other nonprofits at Oscon and the only way to access them is to run nonfree javascript and pay to get past Orielly paywall. Those organizations are operating in the public interest, they are not supposed to be content creators for Oreilly to lock away their words behind nonfree software and DRM for a 100 years. Those nonprofits should be re-uploading those recordings to a no cost platform, and preferably one accessible with free software. I don't know, maybe they already have the copyright permission, they just need someone to download a copy of the talk for them. Maybe now is a good time to push Oreilly to change this situation.

Besides the one point about republishing the recording, you may not be aware that for most conferences, there is a "call for proposals" or some similar term. People submit talk proposals. The conference picks the ones they think are the best and schedule those people to speak. There is basically no money involved. That's for most of the talks. For some talks, they sell the speaking slots to companies to talk about whatever they want. Those talks are like advertisements by a company, and you don't know which is which because its not disclosed. It's unethical and in very similar situations, its illegal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_advertising#Advertis.... If they disclosed, people would still pay, people pay to go to apple's conferences, etc.

I do not think that was what he was saying, but I agree with you. I think there is plenty of future for conferences, but not if you do them for free as a loss leader. They should make good conferences and charge a fair amount of money for them.