Yom Kippur is literally the most important holiday / holiest day for the Jewish religion. Equating it with "pastafarian special days" is at best extremely insensitive, and frankly seems rather ignorant.

Are you saying that pastafarian is not equal to another religion? You're absolutely heinous. I'm reporting you for discrimination.

I'm also joking. But to treat one above another on the basis of religion is literally the definition of discrimination. The exact same discrimination the original article was about.

The extremely obvious major difference here is that the company isn't based in a country with a dark past history of institutional prejudice against Pastafarians, let alone one which eventually led to genocide.

Edit to add: you also have a major false equivalence in your initial premise re: "required to check all religious holidays from all people that could reasonably attend".

SUSECon is a public conference attended by customers/users/community, but specifically in this case they chose a date incompatible with the religious beliefs of an extremely high-profile SUSE employee, whose job responsibilities would require them to be highly visibly working at the conference. This is absolutely not the same thing as failing to schedule the conference dates in a way that is sensitive to all possible attendees.

This situation also should be considered in the context of all the other things discussed in the article (prior to the section on SUSECon), not in isolation.

In general, you should look out for major religious holidays when planning things. That is what is called "Good planning."

Yes, it may be cheap to run a big conference over Christmas... But will you get the attendance you want?

If you want Jews to attend your conference. (Probably not unreasonable in the tech sector.) Not putting your event over the high holidays is smart, same as not putting it over the Easter holidays is smart if your want Christians to show up.

As someone who has gotten this wrong, by planning over EASTER. Yeah, I did replan. And if I was told I'd planned over the high holidays, I'd re-plan, especially if there were 2 other valid dates I could use, which the article says.

As far as pastafarians, I honestly don't know, but when you work with India, with many major holidays, you HAVE to be on top of this stuff, for their holidays.

If I was planning a conference with a large number of pastafarians attending, you know what... I would take their needs into account! It isn't insane. It is good business.

I don't think anybody has suggested this; the only relevant consideration here is whether the scheduling served as retaliation (which, it seems, it didn't).