You've said this several times now, but you haven't said WHAT you believe we've done that favors one part of the community over any other with the exception of our name, which we're not going to change 10 years in.
All right, let's not get out of hand, folks. The two messages I received today had a somewhat less-than-understanding tone, so let me clarify myself.
I'm not insinuating anything sinister. I'm not even insinuating any intentional favoritism on the part of....well, anyone! I think that the mission statement (see previous messages) and various information pages about the conference happens to demonstrate a preference for one community over any other. In fact, the CFP [0] only mentions two, so any other communities might feel excluded from that.
Again, I don't allege any wrongdoing. I just suspect that SCaLE can do better to make people feel comfortable.
By the way, the lack of "GNU" in the name was among the list of things I *don't* expect to change right away, because it is viewed as impractical, and sometimes foolish, by most of the Open Source movement, who have demonstrably influenced the policy of SCaLE in the past (again, see the mission statement and the CFP, id.). It joined abandoning Twitter (which is a nonfree service), removing official iPhone implementations of information apps, and other similar drastic steps that, while maybe commonplace for free software-only conferences, would be very *out* of place, at least currently, for SCaLE.
I want to end this message by saying once again, strongly, decisively, and summarily that I do _not_ fault _any_ of the people involved with planning and running SCaLE for _anything_. They have nothing to be blamed for. I only ask for some discussion of how they can further excel in making people feel at home. While I once might have been criticizing the apparent exclusion of Free Software, I think further discussion on the subject has brought me to realize that there is a simpler and more neutral way to go about this, and that most claims I might have raised would have been baseless.
Thanks, all!
[0] https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/cfp/cfp-information