O'Reilly and Associates has just announced an "Open Source Town
Hall" meeting, to be held on the West Coast next month. The
official announcement is at

http://opensource.oreilly.com/townmeet.html

.)

However, the speakers were not notified in advance that attendees
would be asked to pay a $10 admission fee, which would be donated
to... the Free Software Foundation. They found out only this morning
when the public announcement was made, and some (especially those
from the Apache and various BSD groups) were quite stunned by the
announcement.

It's ironic that O'Reilly would do such a thing, since FSF opposes
the concept of "Open Source;" in fact, it openly and repeatedly 
denigrates it on its Web site. See:

http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html

Since the Free Software Foundation does not support the concept
of "Open Source," it is antithetical to the purpose of an "Open Source"
conference to force attendees to contribute money to it. This is a major
faux pas for which O'Reilly should be remonstrated soundly.

I think that those who publish "Open Source" but do not share the FSF's
quasi-religious belief in the GNU Public License should point this out 
to O'Reilly. Good contacts include Tim O'Reilly (tim@oreilly.com) and 
Sara Winge, the publicity person (sara@oreilly.com).

--Brett