I wrote a response to this (http://tech.puredanger.com/2012/07/12/conference-expectation...) but I think mikeal's comment here gets at the heart of it better: https://gist.github.com/3098860#gistcomment-370439

As a conference organizer for PyCon, I wrote a piece on this last year when the same types of questions arose from a series of Node/JS/Ruby conferences (Non-Profit/Community Python conferences did not, as far as I know, spark the debate).

http://jessenoller.com/2011/05/25/pycon-everybody-pays/

It's a different community/conference and ethos going back the 10 years of PyCon.