There is some riveting drama in the Ruby community around company sponsorships, and directory nudging similar to what happened with Advanced Custom Fields and Secure Custom Fields. This post does the best summary: Shopify, pulling strings at Ruby Central, forces Bundler and RubyGems takeover.
I will only add that Automattic attempted to sponsor RailsConf and have a booth for our open web apps, such as Pocket Casts, Day One, and Beeper, which we thought would be relevant to the open source and open web audience there; however, we were denied. We’ve sponsored other open-source events like DrupalCon before and did so in a tasteful way that wasn’t in conflict with the organization’s mission.
Interesting read! Sponsorship and influence in the open source community can be tricky. Automattic’s approach seems fair and thoughtful.
“Similar to what happened with Advanced Custom Fields and Secure Custom Fields,” he says, conspicuously using the passive voice.
Some of the best CMS and open source conferences I intended were the ones that had their competitors present. Even when Microsoft was fighting open source, it was great to see them have a booth that showed at least somebody in the company got and appreciated open source. Until I cleaned out my closet recently, I had a few Microsoft shirts that promoted Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress on their shirts.