My rant about the poor way Macromedia is treating the speakers at their 1000 dollar DevCon conference received a lot of attention. Especially the call to boycott the event, and my complaints about Jakob charging extra for his session. Well, as you may all have seen, I didn’t have all the facts straight. Jakob is having his own mini-conference before the event. I should have checked my facts a little better before ranting – and for that I apologize.
I feel the focus was shifted from what I felt was the most important part of the rant. And that is Chris MacGregor’s that has to beg for donations to be able to get to the event. Here we have a Flash community member that I feel have done a lot for Macromedia and the Flash community, having to BEG to be able to attend the event. So far his donations have reached $225. Not bad, but still far away from the 1250 dollars he needs for travel and hotel accommodations.
While I think that the only way to make Macromedia understand the error of their ways is to boycott the event, Chris don’t want us to stay away. Out of respect for him, I would like to withdraw my call for a boycott of the event.
Let me quote his comment to my original rant:
Please do not boycott the conference. I am working hard and asking for donation so that I can present my talk, which I have been hard at work on. If no one shows up at the conference two things will happen. First, I’ll be speaking three time to an empty room, and that is going to suck. Second, I’ll probably get ‘the evil eye’ from other speakers for this boycott thing.
I’d like to make it clear that Macromedia is not at fault for my situation. I should have paid more attention to the speaker invite in the first place. I appreciate all the donations that have been coming in (up to $225 in less than 36 hours) but dogging Macromedia is a bit misplaced. They’ve done a great job bringing this conference together, and I want no part of a boycott (so I’d better see you there Jarle!).
Jarle, I really appreciate your support. More than you know my friend. I can not tell you how thankful I am to the support of the Flash developer community. If I can make it to the conference then it will be a testament to the support of every Flash developer who has ever read a tutorial or downloaded an open source FLA. And frankly, the developers are the people that I publish flazoom.com for. Thanks.
Again, I would like to say that Chris has a big heart for the Flash community. And while I respect Chris a lot, I have to disagree with him about Macromedia. I don’t think the way they are treating the speakers at the event is worth any praise. They should be taking better care of the people that spends a lot of their time and energy on helping them make their products better.
Im wondering if maybe we could put together a online conference. Flash community members who have something they would like to present could record their presentation as a mp3 (or a mx video). It could give chris a way to get his usability presentation out to the people. We’d just need to find someone to host it that can handle the bandwidth hit, maybe ultrashock?