I gave the annual guest lecture to the Fort Lewis College student ACM chapter yesterday.

This was the third time I've done this. I get a big kick out it.

The theme this year was Open Source.

Fort Lewis has been all-Windows since forever. But this year the IT staff finally sanctioned an open-source application, Moodle. Apparently the only commercial alternative would have cost about $250,000.

So now the floodgates are open and suddenly there is a huge interest at the college in Open Source: what it is, where it came from -- and how students might be able to make a living with it.

My talk addressed three areas:

People and products:
Richard Stallman and Eric Raymond, what they did and why it was important. Their connection with Linus Torvalds. GNU and Mozilla. The Cathedral and the Bazaar. The Browser Wars. AOL and Netscape. MIT and Berkeley. The increasing value of computer software, particularly on networked computers. Software and the First Amendment. I really stressed that it was real people who made all this happen, not disembodied processes.

Legal issues.
The GPL and the BSD license. Copyright. Copyleft. Works for hire. IBM and Microsoft. Microsoft and BSD. Apple and FreeBSD. Ebay, Google, Amazon, and Linux. Yahoo and FreeBSD. SCO vs. IBM. Novell vs. SCO. ATT&T vs. UCBerkeley. CPAL. Seriously, I covered CPAL and why it is controversial. I really stressed that the people who create software have certain rights, and that legally enforcable licenses are what keeps open source open.

Business and careers.
SaaS. Selling Appliances. Consulting. Starting a company. I made an analogy that I think really hit home: what if you were an expert homebuilder, and you were in a position to say "you buy the land, and everything else for your house is free. The foundation is free, the wood is free, the walls are free, the roof is free, the tools are free. You just pay me for my time and expertise."

One of the professors told me that, now that Open Source is sanctioned, some of the senior classes will be picking open source projects to contribute to. I suggested they investigate joining the effort to merge the Watir and FireWatir projects. Those projects have been trying to find enough hands to do the work for a year. The code on both sides of the fence is well-done, and the students would still be working partly in the OLE/COM world. I hope that works out.

The president of the Fort Lewis ACM chapter graduates in a week. He knows Perl, and he was an intern at IBM writing test automation for WebSphere in Java. I like him, and I like his attitude. He actually interviewed me before agreeing to let me talk, to make sure I knew what I was doing. I got his resume to Peter Allen, I hope he gets considered for a position at Socialtext.