@mlinksva, I see your point. To be clear, I think a lot of these conferences are pertinent. The point I was making is that perhaps I just shouldn't care what they're doing at a conference that I know is designed to help people learn how to work against the goals I'm working toward.

I'm not invited to the Business Software Alliance's conferences either. I'm sure those events are pertinent to the BSA's goals, but they aren't my goals. Meanwhile, I have pretty strong evidence (as best one can get from the CHR wall), for example, that the conference Fontana and Karen are at now (which Fontana has dubbed by the name "SECRET") is primarily populated by attendees who want to help their client/company get away with violating GPL.

As such, just like a BSA conference, I'd be delighted if folks who support software freedom like Fontana and Karen want to go and tell them why they're wrong, but I definitely think my life is less stressful if I don't have to do that.

Meanwhile, your claim about potential corruption through invites is a good point. @Fontana has often claimed that I'm corrupted by my desire to attend conferences. I don't really subscribe to his argument. An easy counter-example is how publicly critical I've been of OSCON and ORA for more than a decade. I thus think that I'm not corrupted on that point — especially when you factor in that ORA gave me an award twice (Best Paper Award in 2000, then the Open Source Award 12 years later).

What I do think I do (which Karen Sandler suggested to me earlier) is that I value these few conferences that have excluded more than their actual value. When she pointed that out, I then got worried that I created an "exclusion bubble" by hyping conferences that reject more than ones that welcome me. My more recent posts have been an attempt to "pull back" on this perceived high value I've been giving the hat-trick group I mentioned early. I did not accomplish that goal perfectly, I suspect.

As for OSCON, it was somewhat a different matter and I only realized later in context it looked related. I was trying to be clear (perhaps unsuccessfully) that I don't blame OSCON for rejecting my talks: I worked through a public CFP process and lost its lottery. OSCON gets a lot of submissions, so any submitter is a droplet in a firehose. And, from what I hear, one basically has to lobby organizers to get talks accepted there, and I frankly don't think that's worth lobbying for it.

My main worry about OSCON was this: it's tougher to justify going if I don't have a talk accepted, and I'm trying to figure out what (if anything) I need to go for, and delineate properly between needing and wanting to go. OSCON is admittedly an important meeting place for this field, but I'm not objective on that point now that my proposals were rejected.

But, anyway, my obsession with being excluded is absolutely more about my own prior life experience more than about the facts of the matter. But, I don't know how anyone could go through one's entire formative years as "oh, I guess we get $Person" [0] and not have that deep fear of rejection as a partially insurmountable component of one's psychological make-up.

This kind of stuff just sticks with you no matter how much psychotherapy you get. The best politicians in the geek world know that many geeks have had this life experience, and they thus use exclusionary practices to get under the skin of people who have predilections exclusion-fear. The most sly part of this political tactic is that it's one of those tactics that works even when the victim of the tactic is fully aware enough to — say — write a long comment on pump.io explaining that's what's going on. ;)

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[0] When I was a teenager in high school, my uncle — also a geek picked on in high school — taught me the "true test" of how badly gym class was. It goes like this: a lot of people say: "Oh, I was last picked in gym class". But it clearly wasn't that bad if they say “last pick”. I (and my uncle too) were never "last pick".

See, there's that moment when you're down to two people and the jock says: "I pick $foo", and the other jock says: "then, I guess we have $bar". Being "I guess we have" is an order of magnitude worse than being last picked; if you're last picked, you're more desirable than someone on the planet, at least. If you don't know that difference, gym class just wasn't that bad for you. ☺