O'Reilly only pays the speakers that wouldn't speak otherwise. I can tell you I've never gotten paid to speak at an O'Reilly conference and Chris Wanstrath wasn

O'Reilly only pays the speakers that wouldn't speak otherwise. I can tell you I've never gotten paid to speak at an O'Reilly conference and Chris Wanstrath wasn't paid to keynote at RailsConf either. I assume they do this because they know we'll speak whether or not they pay us. I'm totally bewildered over the fact that a high-dollar conference run by O'Reilly does less for speakers than small regional conferences like GoRuCo.