Oregon State University invited me to give a technical talk yesterday about PostgreSQL and open source community. It was aimed at graduate level students, and an attempt to recruit them.

It’s not in the slides, but I told a short story in the ‘but there’s a disconnect’ slide. I wanted to convey to them that both the free and open source community and the educational system are failing them when it comes to open source. I attended a conference last fall that had nearly 1000 undergraduate and graduate students. I staffed a booth about open source software, and nearly every student that dropped by couldn’t think of a single open source project they’d ever heard of. With prompting, they’d agree that Linux was probably open source.

We had a discussion about how our community manages conflict, who the big production users of PostgreSQL are, and how folks can get involved. I gave out a few tshirts and buttons, and ran into some old friends from Open Source Bridge.

• Why should you care about a database like PostgreSQL? (PDF)
• Why Should you care about a database like PostgreSQL (Keynote version)