I’m a member of the IOUG MySQL Council.
http://www.ioug.org/mysql_council

I wasn’t hinting about anything. I have been to MANY conferences in the past year, all of the following have been put on by independent groups – OUG Harmony in Finland, Northeast PHP in Boston, the 1st Latin American MySQL, NoSQL and Cloud Conference in Buenos Aires, the Professional IT Community Conference and SouthEast LinuxFest in Charlotte, NC. I have done plenty of O’Reilly conferences like OSCon and the previous incarnation of the Santa Clara MySQL Conference. I’m not sure why you think I was hinting at Percona Live being “not refreshing” – I’m just tired of the crappy keynotes, which are obvious sponsor deals. This is something that O’Reilly conferences suffer from, and something Oracle Open World also suffers from, not just the community conferences. Don’t put words in my mouth!

As for MySQL Connect and community – The MySQL Council, which is entirely made up of *community* members, was the driving force behind HAVING MySQL Connect in the first place. A committee of community members (including me, Giuseppe and Ronald, off the top of my head) chose most of the talks for MySQL Connect, so there was plenty of community involvement in planning and executing.

I stood at a community booth during MySQL Connect – the IOUG booth. http://twicsy.com/i/94FQtc

As one of the founders and only continual organizer of Open DB Camp, you don’t have to tell me that a community run conference needs sponsors. I’m fully aware of that, and have made that happen for 5 years for Open DB Camp.

And some of the talks are marketing pitches – I don’t consider features or roadmaps to be marketing talks – In fact, one of the complaints about Percona Live is that Oracle doesn’t do MySQL Roadmap talks there. I’m talking about those talks that are 40 minutes of “MySQL doesn’t do this well, and my product does” without learning anything about how it works, how to set it up, etc.

Also, PLMCE is not a community conference, it’s a business conference. See http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2011/08/09/announcing-percona-live-mysql-conference-and-expo-2012/

No marketing pitches? Announcing MySQL 5.6 was itself a marketing pitch (as was “Oracle Innovation Day” but I don’t remember seeing you there). At Oracle conferences the pitches just come from one vendor: Oracle.

You’re hinting that PLMCE is “not refreshing” because there are talks by different vendors, but the MySQL ecosystem consists of multiple different vendors providing different products.

Was there a free booth for open source community projects at Connect like at PLMCE? Any community involvement in planning and executing at all? No.

I seem to recall you standing at a free booth at PLMCE in April… Personally, I find community refreshing, not vendor lock-in.

As for that second conference two weeks later? At a vendor sponsored conference the talks about a vendor’s products are about either selling you that product or to try to you using (and by extension, paying) for it. That is why the conference doesn’t need sponsors. The conference pays for itself by encouraging the attendees to continue to invest in the companies products.

A community run conference needs sponsors because that last sentence doesn’t make sense in a community.

While the conference itself is a form of marketing, it doesn’t generate revenue the same way a vendor conference does. As the community conference is not focused on one vendor’s products, ideas or ways of doing things, conference attendees may choose any product featured at the conference.

MySQL 5.6 RC was announced there and there were a lot of posts about that at the time, so that’s why you might have missed it.

It was really refreshing. I went to another conference 2 weeks later that was also run by the company that made the software and it was the same way – because they didn’t need any high-level sponsors, all the talks were very informative and not trying to sell you something.