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Spurned O'Reilly 'Foo' Camp Attendees Create 'Bar'

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the foo-vs-bar-gets-foobar'd dept.

theodp writes "CNET reports on this weekend's Bar Camp, an open-source alternative to O'Reilly Media's A-List Foo Camp, which CEO Tim O'Reilly explains employs a "Bozo filter" to exclude undesirable attendees.

4 of 101 comments (clear)

  1. insanely expensive by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    These O'reilly events are insanely expensive, teh O'Reilly OSCON in Europe has a ticket price of £700 , thats over $1000 US or Euro - quite a huge barrier to access.
    Especially as many FOSS people are doing it in their downtime - so they don't have an instituion to foot the bill.
    Sounds like Tim is really coining it in, to the detriment of the community.

  2. The sword cuts both ways. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Ironically, Bar Camp attendee Dave Winer, who has been pretty vocal about not being invited to Foo Camp, went to the uppity invite-only World Economic Forum in Davos once.

    Once.

  3. Try as I might... by anandamide · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I cannot assign this article to the category "Stuff That Matters"... It just keeps jumping into the category "Stuff That is Totally Irrelevant".

  4. Re:Bozo Filters by ebuck · · Score: 2, Interesting

    There's some very appealing ideas that really are bad ones.

    I remember reading of O'Reilly presentations with titles like "Design as you go!", emploring the virtures of not planning out anything about your software, just throwing a bunch of coders at it and let the architecture "take care of itself".

    Five years later I received (part time) the pleasure of trying to assimilate the twice abandoned project that was the flagship product being developed under this plan. It wasn't bad, but it was Java instilled with all of that good'ole Basic spagetti. Add to that a dev team that was at a standstill because fixing any major thing meant they'd have to take a crack a re-architecting.

    If they were really on to something, it would have been interesting, but I guess they were really just trying to pitch their product. Had they advocated unit testing, some sort of code review, or any other quality practice, perhaps they would have had something. Instead it was literally, "embrace the anarchy" which ruled the message of that day.

    It is important to remember that not all ideas are of equal quality. It's easy to forget when you're having a NASA Astronaut being followed up by a Flatlander in the name of blance.