Bruce Eckel has posted a brutally honest perspective on the overwhelming vendor exposure at Pycon this year.
I actually agree with many of Bruce’s points — PyCon this year very obviously had commercial sponsorship, from the “diamond keynotes” to the Lightning talks. I did miss the lightning talks of old. Much like Bruce, I did find an oasis — the open space discussions (but that’s because the ones I went to were on concurrency).
On the flip side, I enjoyed a great many of the talks, although there was some very painful ones where they were too dense, or the presenter just simply did know how to present.
My experience has been positive, and I have met some people, had some great discussions and learned some good stuff. I know this is simply a bump in the road until we hit a stride with PyCon as a regular con as a whole.
Commercial sponsorship is great, as long as it’s clear, and not invasive. I expect to have vendors, recruiters and other stuff like that at the con — it’s a programming con, if I didn’t have recruiters recruiting, I’d assume we were doing something wrong.