DN639417780

Subject: O'Reilly cancels Tcl track at OSSC - DN [1]

Eric Melski <ericm@pop.ajubasolutions.com> - 26 Jun 2000 - comp.lang.tcl

 Yes, as others have stated, O'Reilly cancelled the Tcl track at the OSSC.
 As Scott Redman noted, it was because not enough people registered _for
 the Tcl track_.  At registration time, people had the option to specify
 which track they were most interested in; apparently, an extremely small
 number (fewer than a dozen) people marked "Tcl" as the track they were
 most interested in.  O'Reilly, after talking with some people here at
 Ajuba (at least with Brent Welch, I believe with Jeffrey as well), decided
 that it would do Tcl more harm than good to be represented by 10 people at
 a conference attended by more than 1,000 Perl users.

 When the track was cancelled, O'Reilly emailed me personally to let me
 know, and offered me the option to maintain my registration or cancel it,
 with a phone number to call with my decision.  When I called, they
 cancelled my registration as I asked them to, no hassles.  I assume that
 they contacted all the registrants who marked Tcl as their primary track;
 I can only guess that those who were not thus contacted did not mark Tcl
 as their primary track.

 I believe Brent posted a message here late last week about this, before
 the cancellation actually occurred.  He was looking for a headcount of
 people who were going; obviously, not enough people replied to that post.
 Yes, this was perhaps not the best medium for obtaining that poll
 information, but Brent was working on very short notice (I think he had
 maybe 1 or 2 days to get back to O'Reilly with an advisory decision of
 some kind).

 I have no doubt that the low registration was due to the Tcl2K conference
 and the Tcl Europe conference; most companies won't pay to send their
 people to two or more Tcl conferences in a single year.  It just doesn't
 really make sense for them.  It is unfortunate that the track was
 cancelled, but I believe that it was in the best interests of the
 community to do so.  I look forward to a spectacular conference in 2001.

 With regards to sticking with USENIX for the conference versus working
 with O'Reilly, remember that in many ways, it was not really our choice.
 The Tcl conference was not really a viable one for USENIX, which deals
 best with very large conferences (that is, thousands of attendees), and
 seems to lack the machinery for handling smaller (low hundreds of
 attendees) conferences.  I believe that USENIX probably would have
 dropped the conference within a few years anyway.  By agreeing to attach
 the Tcl conference to the OSSC, O'Reilly, I believe, is really helping to
 keep the Tcl conference alive.

    Eric Melski                            The Other Tcl Guy
    ericm at ajubasolutions.com            Ajuba Solutions