One of my larger complaints about Linux Foundation events is that they are very much targeted at corporations with large budgets to send people to conferences.

For example, as someone who has mostly been an indie OSS maintainer over their career, I would love to go to Open Source Summit and meet up with people to discuss what problems they are having with the software I maintain and how we can collaborate on resolving those problems.

But my choices are to register as a "hobbyist" (a frankly demeaning thing to call an indie maintainer) at $249, which requires me to go ask them for a discount code (also frankly demeaning), or register at the full $949 rate, or maybe I could get the "small business" discount code which brings it down to *only* $500. Man, what a favor, huh?

I understand that putting on these events is very costly, but when indie OSS maintainers are given the option of paying nearly $1000 or having to go ask someone for a "hobbyist" discount code, it seems very disrespectful to the maintainers who are building the actual software that this summit is about.

Do you really think the guy in Nebraska who is holding up all modern digital infrastructure in his spare time has the money to spend $949 to go to a conference? For all the talking we do about building inclusive conferences, this has to include *access* for indie maintainers.