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When I was hired on at my new job, I was apparently referred to internally as “the open source guy”. Now, that’s a moniker I don’t really mind because I do espouse the open source/free software philosophy and I definitely see it as being useful both from a personal standpoint and as a professional developer. Well the new gig heavily encourages knowledge-sharing and building of “intellectual capital” via presentations and such, so I thought that open source as a community, development strategy, and philosophy might be a worthwhile thing to share. So, this is my request for comments on ideas for what to present. But rather than just asking that question, here’s sort of what I had in mind.

First I’d have to do some definition/demystifying up front: answering the who/what/why’s and all that, because this is a heavy Microsoft crowd, though not so much that they are fanboys or anything like that (well, some might be but they likely won’t attend) it’s just what they know and that’s what the clients run on. I know at least a few people, including some of the partners, are genuinely interested in open source not only as a business strategy but as a community. So I think the first few big talking points in this section would be:

• What is open source? (I’d like to stick mostly with definitions here and not delve too much into history and/or the fractious issue of what constitues “free” or “open source” software)
• What open source projects they might be aware of, even if they don’t know they are open source (Linux, Mozilla, Java (yes, Java), PHP, Subversion, etc.)
• What open source projects affect them that they are likely unaware of (Apache, Python, MySQL, Mediawiki (wikipedia))
• Why open source? (Why do developers give away code? Why use it?)

And that would be the bulk of the presentation. From there I can come up with a more directed approach talking about how my company can leverage the advantages of open source to help increase productivity/add value/etc. Really I just wanted to hear what people thought about the first part and whether or not I was missing anything or perhaps should take some stuff out. Though if anyone has any feedback for what open source could mean for a small IT consulting firm, then by all means, fire away