Not affiliated with Google or CNCF but I've noticed too that it is ran as a business and so are their meetups all over the world. They also have a gigantic staff for what they do and it's obvious at this point that they must be paying themselves very well. It is also very disappointing that their events are so expensive indeed for a non-profit given that they have such a huge amount of sponsors https://events.linuxfoundation.org/kubecon-cloudnativecon-no...

I run a conference myself and we manage to be 3 times cheaper with only 8 sponsors and we take care of travel and lodging for speakers. With the amount of sponsors they get, they could get away with $10 tickets like PyCon Europe which is free for all and still take care of travel and lodging for speakers. When Google gave Kubernetes for free to CNCF non profit, I don't think this is what they had in mind and may be why they went with OUC instead.

"With the amount of sponsors they get, they could get away with $10 tickets like PyCon Europe which is free for all and still take care of travel and lodging for speakers. When Google gave Kubernetes for free to CNCF non profit, I don't think this is what they had in mind and may be why they went with OUC instead."

It's very expensive to run 10,000 person events, we run the events as pretty much break even across different projects, some events make money, some loss money, it all balances out. We also produce transparency reports for our events: https://www.cncf.io/blog/2020/01/09/kubecon-cloudnativecon-n...

Also keep in mind that nothing is free, running VENDOR NEUTRAL events is a hard business, ORM laid off all its events team recently during the pandemic (https://www.businessinsider.com/oreilly-media-layoffs-events...), I'm proud to say we haven't laid anyone off.