>OTOH, my impression is that at most of those events, there's no paper, just code, which to me is far less useful. I know that, when I'm learning something, having both code and an explanation is, by far, the best combination.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but if memory serves me, less than a year ago you said you had never attended a SQL Saturday event.

So how many SQL Saturday, SharePoint Saturday, and Code Camp events have you attended? The reason I'm asking - your impression is quite a ways off. :)

>"Community service" and "community event" aren't necessarily synonyms. I'd argue fairly strongly that running SWFox is community service. Because we do it, a lot more articles and code get written. Many of our speakers (including me) choose to share them publicly after the conference. User groups sessions are given by our speakers both before and after the conference. Without Southwest Fox, there would simply be fewer high-quality pieces of writing about VFP.
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Yes, speakers sometimes "practice" their sessions at actual free events before delivering them at a paid conference. I spoke for VS Live/SQL Live for 4 years and I practiced several presentations at community events.

Additionally, some of them even continue to deliver the talk after the conference, though that might possibly violate the conference/speaker terms agreement. Having said that, vast majority of conferences are "developer-friendly" enough not to enforce it unless they can prove actual damages. Any conference that was so serious about holding content private would probably just not invite the speaker the next time around, but even that can backfire. I know a speaker who has broken about a dozen conference rules, but continues to speak for them because he drives business. And that's a segue to my point - conferences in themselves need to avoid financial losses.

So I agree - paid commercial conferences can generate incremental benefit to the non-paid area. That's going to have a level of truth for both SW Fox as well as other conferences. I think that is a bit different than saying, "running SW Fox is a community service" but I understand your last point.

Again, Microsoft differentiates between the two as a standard of metrics, though they acknowledge the incremental benefit of conferences to the community.