I just don't get where all the Joel-bashing comes from. You'd never know it from reading this rant or any of the comments but Joel is giving his software to these students for free:
"FogBugz would work great for tracking this: if you’re doing a capstone project and need access to FogBugz, please let us know and we’ll be happy to set you up for free."
More importantly Joel is paying for students to participate in the program, and providing one of his programmers as a mentor. He's also had well-known, paid internship programs at Fogcreek. To me that says he's taken the initiative to fill this void in academia himself, with his own money no less.
"Joel is giving his software to these students for free"
The last thing Joel needs is students getting used to and/or turning software like Trac or Bugzilla into direct competitors. Having noticed this, its pretty obvious why Joel would give away FogBugz.
I agree, it is very obvious that Joel would promote his own software. That's not really what I intended my post to be about though.
Joel has long said he only hires great programmers that know CS theory in and out. I don't think that's changed, he's just also identified that recent graduates are lacking in time-management and collaboration skills needed to be good industrial programmers. However, he isn't just having a debate about academic vs vocational education but offering paid internships, and now sponsoring one of these Capstone groups, in an effort to give students the skills he thinks they are missing.
As someone else put it elsewhere, 'the first taste is always free'...
Companies have been giving away software to college courses for as long as there's been an industry. It's a long-term marketing strategy based on the idea that if you give free software to 200 students (with limits on how it can be used so they can't make money using it), then inside ten years many of them will end up in positions where they're asked to recommend software and yours is the first they ever used. Altruistic it is not.
Just because it's business doesn't mean it's not altruistic. pg does YC because he wants young hackers to do interesting work and solve the money problem, but he wants a return. Joel wants people to manage their time and get their work done in an organized way, and he believes in that so much that he wrote a product that does it. I'm sure he wouldn't care if you used any great product to track your time, but there's only one he can offer for free.
Joel is training people who are about to enter into the workplace, and through hearing about this are self-selected as people likely to be both vocal and interested, to use FogBugz.
It's not charity - it's very smart marketing and most likely good business.
"FogBugz would work great for tracking this: if you’re doing a capstone project and need access to FogBugz, please let us know and we’ll be happy to set you up for free."
More importantly Joel is paying for students to participate in the program, and providing one of his programmers as a mentor. He's also had well-known, paid internship programs at Fogcreek. To me that says he's taken the initiative to fill this void in academia himself, with his own money no less.