Ad-hominem, anyone? This thread to be filled of a lot of these.

That isn’t giving it away for free Bryan. It’s just not getting money up front. Like I said above:

Yes, I know it appears that he’s offering it “for free” but appearances are deceptive. Every software company who deals with colleges like this will push their products not merely for free, but with extra donations tagged on. They don’t do it because they’re being altruistic. In fact it’s become a major problem in universities because with funding getting tighter, the pressure to make an economically based decision instead of a teaching based one is enormous. The reason they do this is that it’s a long-term marketing ploy, as explained above. Joel’s just doing it on the cheap. And it’s done in every discipline – Intel funds a clean room here and takes the top two students every year. The top two students here are more often than not actual bona-fide geniuses whose net worth to Intel will far outstrip the cost of the donation Intel made. If the deal can be struck constructively, it can be beneficial, but that’s a rare occurance – and Joel’s idea of a donation just plain isn’t beneficial to anyone but Joel. It is snake oil salesmanship. Heck, it’s not even good snake oil salesmanship at that.

Well, except that he *is* giving it away for free. I’ve been using FogBugz hosted for free for over a year now. That doesn’t mean I’m drinking the Joel Kool-Aid. It just means yes, he actually is giving the software away to certain groups of people, students doing capstone projects included.

Bryan, as everyone’s said before, it is a sales pitch. Joel’s not giving his stuff away for free here, he’s looking for product placement for free in a market most companies are paying a lot of money to get into. Altruistic, he’s not!

Mark, he isn’t *selling* his wares in that article. He’s offering to give them away for free.

From the article:

“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. We can also set you up with beta access to kiln, our hosted version of Mercurial, which includes a code review feature.”