I’ve exhibited at Maker Faire a couple of times and visited many times, and exhibited at Open Sauce twice.

Early Maker Faire (in the Bay Area) was a mix of art booths/vehicles coming out of Burning Man storage and independent makers showing their projects and inventions. Then it rapidly commercialized with company booths taking most of the show space, and then it finally imploded financially. The recent resurrected version is less commercial, much smaller, and aimed more at younger children and their parents, but is overall not that far off from the Make origins.

Open Sauce is very much Creators (content and otherwise) and independent makers, growing in scale every year. It works well, in part because the company/sponsor booths are no larger or flashier than the hacker/maker booths.

I've spoken with a few conference organizers about this—how do you please sponsors enough to make them want to come back the next year, but also make it so their booths / areas on the floor don't turn into boring "whatever-conference" spaces.

It's a balance and so far Open Sauce seems to have done okay there; but a couple sponsored booths felt a bit more corporate/salesy and out of place this year.

You could tell people would kind of give them a wide berth compared to walking around other areas, where people were more densely packed around all the booths.