We don't think 1400 is impressive. That's why it is the minimum score to apply. A 1400 would put someone in the bottom third of the class at MIT, Stanford, Harvard, or wherever. Those are the kind of people who've proven that they can make it (if only barely) through these courses.
MIT would agree with you about CS not being a science. The CS department at MIT is actually a subsection within the EE department which is part of the School of Engineering. The real sciences (Biology, Chemistry, Physics) are collected up in the School of Science.
But there is nothing wrong with engineering! It is fun and satisfying to build real-world things, even if we're never going to cure cancer.
-- Philip (kicking back at ArsDigita London where the flowering trees are really beautiful all over the city)
You've a bright future in business, Tom, but only if you learn that businesses don't need tax writeoffs. Businesses aren't taxed the same as individuals. Virtually everything that a company buys is 100% deductible. I can hire a personal masseuse for every programmer here (currently we only have one masseuse). Her fees are deductible. A donation to the Boston Symphony Orchestra is no more or less deductible than the salary of the masseuse, the salary of a programmer, the rent on the building, the pencils in the stock room, etc.
As for whether this is a recruiting pipeline for us, it isn't a very effective one. We need to hire 200 developers in the next year or so. The first ADU graduate won't be available for more than 14 months. Many of them will return to their professional lives (some are university profs or MDs or PhDs in other fields). Some will wish to start their own businesses. Some will wish to work for large companies. We might end up hiring a couple. That would be $500,000 per person in recruiting expenses. Plus a lot of distraction. So it wouldn't be very good business.
To the extent that we have a "business model" (I don't even like to use the phrase when talking about ArsDigita Corporation), it is.... Open Source. All of the materials that we develop, including the video lectures, will be available free of charge to other schools worldwide. So it is true that we're too poor right now to make a huge difference by ourselves (teaching 30 students). But remember that the world is full of rich people and companies who might like to do this but have not because they can't get the curriculum together or don't know enough PhD CS nerds. If 100 other organizations worldwide pick up our courseware and use it, that would be 3000 people/year. That would be a lot more than MIT and Stanford together educate.
Not only have we open-licensed all of our content but we're going to spend summers inviting people from around the world to come learn how to teach our curriculum.
Basically the world right now is floating in money. And many of those with money are in fact quite generous. What is in scarce supply is knowledge and human resources. By showing other people how to do what we're doing and helping them do it, we hope to encourage imitators.
Actually we've budgeted about $30,000 per year per student in expenses to arsdigita.org and the number will probably grow a bit (for one thing, we're paying faculty $150,000/year).
I admit to secretly hoping that schools with $billions in the bank (e.g., Harvard and MIT) will find other ways to raise money than shaking down middle class families. But really the point of ArsDigita University is just what we say it is... to teach the undergrad CS curriculum to folks who might have missed it when they were in college studying liberal arts or biology or whatever.
We have roughly $40 million in the bank right now.
If you are qualified to work at ArsDigita (you've got a CS degree from a top school and have done the problem sets from our course at MIT), we will be delighted to pay your travel expenses plus a $10,000 signing bonus.
We offer living stipends to people who are really smart and really poor. As for those who had the bad luck to get double 200s on their SATs, wellll.... MIT doesn't take a risk on those folks and we don't want to say that we're smarter than the MIT admissions office.
Bottom line is that we will be no more or less elitist than MIT or Stanford.
We don't do engineering in Tcl, God Dammit!!!!
on
ArsDigita University
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· Score: 4
ArsDigita does its engineering work in
a data modeling and declarative query language (SQL)
abstractions implemented in PL/SQL or Java running inside the RDBMS
helper code implemented in C running inside the RDBMS or the Web server
We do some presentation and merging RDBMS data with graphic design templates in Tcl or the AOLserver templating language (ADP).
Why do we use Tcl for this last step? We don't anymore. ArsDigita will build you a 100% pure Java site and support it. Our toolkit is about getting the data models and workflow models right, not about language religion. Beyond that, we use whatever is most expedient. It turns out that AOLserver is a great efficient proven Web development tool. It happened to include a compiled-in Tcl interpreter. So we used it. If we were as smart as you, we'd have rewritten the whole thing in Perl instead of building a $20 million (revenue) profitable business.
If you don't know about any of the advancements in computer technology developed at MIT over the last 40 years nor any of the useful innovative software systems written in Lisp, maybe you should take a computer history course.
Here's a fine example of how MIT turns out better engineers than Swarthmore. Elliot is whinging about Tcl and AOLserver while the engineers at AOL built a $120 billion business serving over 30,000 hits/second with AOLserver. Elliot hasn't bothered to check the arsdigita.com Web site (we've announced Apache and 100% Java versions of our toolkit, which really never used Tcl for much more than presentation; the Apache version is already up and running (it was authored by Robert Thau, the designer of the Apache module structure)).
If Elliot had looked at the curriculum, he'd have noticed that, just like MIT, we don't actually teach any computer languages. We expect the students to be bright enough to pick up the syntax as they learn the concepts (we might have to break the rules a tiny bit at http://arsdigita.org/university/ because we're introducing Java relatively early and Java has so much syntax and machinery).
As for teaching the "elite", Elliot, well we're sorry that we don't meet your standards. But with my piddling $1 million/year that I could afford to invest, we can't innovate too much. We're going to teach the Stanford/MIT stuff to people who had the qualifications necessary to get into Stanford and MIT in the same way (face-to-face education) used by Stanford and MIT. We're also going to let it all hang out on the Web for those who want to be monsters of self-motivation, but we don't judge ourselves by how well those folks learn.
Anyway, the bottom line Elliot is that if we had your intelligence and generosity, we could do more. But we don't so we're limited to just teaching 30 people/year in Cambridge for free.
Some of the folks who have applied to ArsDigita University already have MDs, for example, and they fit your profile of the "costing these people $125K". But others have history degrees from Ivy League colleges. High SAT scores + a Yale degree in humanities big bucks job. Even ArsDigita.com pays graduating CS nerds a mere $100,000.
But you're kind of missing the point. This isn't career prep. We don't teach C programming or Oracle DBA. We teach the standard MIT/Stanford-style CS curriculum. We want to teach people who are going to change the world in some interesting way, not get all excited about $125K one way or the other (that's kind of like a rounding error for someone skilled in IT).
On the social life score, all I can say is that we expect our students to enjoy the same rich social life enjoyed by top computer science students around the world:-)
The original ACS stuff was built on Illustra, a commercialized version of Postgres. Postgres has some very nice features, e.g., tables that can inherit their structure from other tables. And in fact it would be very convenient to use these for ACS 4.0 (coming out in about two months).
But ultimately we gave up on Illustra because it wasn't reliable enough.
Oracle does have some very nice features of its own, e.g., the ability to run Java and PL/SQL inside the database. But I don't want to be remembered for pushing Oracle. In fact, I kind of walked away from their Web tools (we built www.comdex.com in 1996 using Oracle Webserver). They were clunkier and slower than AOLserver.
The thing to keep in mind is that the substrate layers don't matter. If you change out the RDBMS or the operating system or the HTTP server or the scripting language no end-user will care. But they care if the workflow or the data model is changed.
Not as sad as I was on that Boston Marathon day (when we got 30X the traffic that the customer told us to expect). But is that a failure for our toolkit? No. We had the equivalent of 8 400 MHz CPUs working on the Marathon server (two Sun E450s). If you can serve what seemed like half the US population with two Sun E450s using PHP, that's great. But so what?
There are people using ACS with a fat-ish db server plus a rack of small Web servers plus a load balancer. They don't seem to have any trouble scaling to arbitrary size.
"On really expensive boxes"? Photo.net handles 1 million hits/day, goes to the database on every page load, and runs on a computer with 4 180 MHz processors! There are 10-year-olds whose Quake machines would crush my server like a bug.
I am so sick of being the poster child for AOLserver (5 MB of code, smaller than the Oracle client library) and Tcl (which takes about two hours to learn). They are both open source, they don't get in the way, but if you want to use our toolkit (which is also free and open-source), you can now do it with Apache or with all-Java inside Oracle. Ben Adida ported it to PostgreSQL so you can be 100% open-source.
Anyway, if you want to start from scratch in MySQL and PHP and try to replicate the effort of ArsDigita's 80 full-time developers, be my guest. But don't confuse yourself into thinking that these are "solutions" (as you put it). They are tools.
The problem with giving students bad grades in courses is that (1) not only were they confused to begin with and didn't learn the material, but (2) they will be pissed off with you later!:-) Anyway, ACS has nothing to do with AOLserver or Tcl, really. SAP was written in COBOL initially. I'm sure a lot of language snobs threw rocks at them but at the end of the day a good engineer realizes that the value is in the data model and business process workflow. Now that ArsDigita has $20 million in revenue, we're releasing pure Java and Apache versions of ACS. So the anonymous coward (and former bad student) could have learned that his statements about being "forced" to develop in Tcl are simply wrong. All that he would have had to do is visit arsdigita.com. Anyway, the sad thing is that most people aren't good enough engineers to compare apples to apples. So they compare our toolkit, which is all about data models, to something like PHP, which is probably a fine programming language but it does not even try to to do the things that ACS does. On the scaling issue originally posted. People with sane tech architectures are usually able to rely on serving 10 dynamic requests/second/processor (these would involve a db query and a template merge). Could you do more than this? Sure! The real-time gamer guys build amazing stuff using UDP, custom C code, and in-memory databases of their own design. But what's the point for the average online community or ecommerce publisher? Most people with high traffic sites can afford a rack of processors and a load balancing switch. Anyway, I don't want to get into a flame war about AOLserver or Tcl. If you want to use our toolkit with pure Java running inside Oracle 8.1.7, go for it! You won't even need a separate Web server. If you want to use Apache instead of AOLserver, go for it! You'll probably need a slightly bigger machine but it won't really affect the end result. At ArsDigita, instead of trying to keep up with the latest in fashionable languages, we spend our time worrying about "What data models and workflow structures would we need to run the entire MIT Sloan School from a Web-based system?"
The HP Unix group did not give me a box because I wrote something nice about them in my first book! HP has been giving MIT various kinds of support for four decades or so. The photo.net server was given because we were (and still are) going to do an experiment with lots of user-uploaded photos. They were also interested in FlashPix (something HP has since abandoned). Anyway, the folks with whom I was working had nothing to do with HP-UX marketing.
The K460 is a bit oversized for photo.net, but remember that what you see as a static URL (with a.html extension) is actually hitting Oracle several times (to find out if there are comments and links on a page), REGEXPing, etc. We also use it to serve www.lcs.mit.edu and about 20 more sites (including http://software.arsdigita.com where you can look at and download all of our source code).
As for America Online, they've not given me anything. They serve 28,000 hits/second with AOLserver and aren't all that interested in whether the rest of the world likes it. It works for them...
Well... it is probably true that MIT isn't dying to hire me this week. But as far as I can tell there isn't that much ill-will remaining from the days when I suggested that MIT faculty "move into the 1970s and install an RDBMS". They all woke up to the Web by late 1998 and since then I've been getting along remarkably well with the LCS faculty.
Well, I guess these quotes resonated with Perl weenies. Frankly, I'd forgotten having written them. Both Perl and Tcl are fine, I guess, if what you're doing is bridging the Web to an RDBMS (which is what I'm doing). If I were building another computer-aided engineering system (see my resume for what a loser I used to be), I'd get back into the language religious wars (I'd be choosing between Lisp and Java, I guess).
XML is a printed representation of structured data. RDBMS is a solution to the problems of atomic transactions, concurrency control, and isolation of users from seeing the results of incomplete transactions made by other users. See the db chapter of my book (available for free at photo.net) for more on this.
A lot of folks get confused on this point because journalists are so confused.
Uh, John, maybe you should read the book. I distribute a Perl script (for building an image library from a flat-file database). I talk a bit about Apache/mod_perl (not much since I haven't used it). I don't discourage anyone from using a technology that produces a reliable, responsive Web service for their users.
Instead of getting into a religious war about languages, we attack problems that we think are interesting (see http://arsdigita.com/projects.html ). Our students at MIT and our clients at ArsDigita don't want to hear about commodity software; they want to hear about innovative solutions.
This one really hurts. I run a small research project at the Lab for Computer Science (same building as the AI Lab). But I can't be a professor because I'm an officer (CEO actually) of arsdigita.com, a $6 million Internet services company. Given that ArsDigita is doubling every six months, I can't just wave goodbye to my friends here and kick back at MIT. Also, the MIT CS building is dog-unfriendly. So overall it isn't so bad to have the job that I do. The bottom line is that I designed and teach 6.916 and MIT undergrads and grad students can learn from it (so can everyone else since all the course materials are available free on the Web, including three textbooks, three psets, and all the lecture notes; Caltech, University of Munich, and NYU have already adopted the course or portions of the course). The students don't really care whether a teacher has a particular bureaucratic title or not.
Isn't GPL free enough? AOLserver 3.0 will be available under GPL (though personally I prefer to spend my time thinking about the user's problem (data model, flow)) than mucking about with someone else's C code.
Slashdot Mirror
We don't think 1400 is impressive. That's why it is the minimum score to apply. A 1400 would put someone in the bottom third of the class at MIT, Stanford, Harvard, or wherever. Those are the kind of people who've proven that they can make it (if only barely) through these courses.
MIT would agree with you about CS not being a science. The CS department at MIT is actually a subsection within the EE department which is part of the School of Engineering. The real sciences (Biology, Chemistry, Physics) are collected up in the School of Science.
But there is nothing wrong with engineering! It is fun and satisfying to build real-world things, even if we're never going to cure cancer.
-- Philip (kicking back at ArsDigita London where the flowering trees are really beautiful all over the city)
You've a bright future in business, Tom, but only if you learn that businesses don't need tax writeoffs. Businesses aren't taxed the same as individuals. Virtually everything that a company buys is 100% deductible. I can hire a personal masseuse for every programmer here (currently we only have one masseuse). Her fees are deductible. A donation to the Boston Symphony Orchestra is no more or less deductible than the salary of the masseuse, the salary of a programmer, the rent on the building, the pencils in the stock room, etc.
As for whether this is a recruiting pipeline for us, it isn't a very effective one. We need to hire 200 developers in the next year or so. The first ADU graduate won't be available for more than 14 months. Many of them will return to their professional lives (some are university profs or MDs or PhDs in other fields). Some will wish to start their own businesses. Some will wish to work for large companies. We might end up hiring a couple. That would be $500,000 per person in recruiting expenses. Plus a lot of distraction. So it wouldn't be very good business.
To the extent that we have a "business model" (I don't even like to use the phrase when talking about ArsDigita Corporation), it is.... Open Source. All of the materials that we develop, including the video lectures, will be available free of charge to other schools worldwide. So it is true that we're too poor right now to make a huge difference by ourselves (teaching 30 students). But remember that the world is full of rich people and companies who might like to do this but have not because they can't get the curriculum together or don't know enough PhD CS nerds. If 100 other organizations worldwide pick up our courseware and use it, that would be 3000 people/year. That would be a lot more than MIT and Stanford together educate.
Not only have we open-licensed all of our content but we're going to spend summers inviting people from around the world to come learn how to teach our curriculum.
Basically the world right now is floating in money. And many of those with money are in fact quite generous. What is in scarce supply is knowledge and human resources. By showing other people how to do what we're doing and helping them do it, we hope to encourage imitators.
Actually we've budgeted about $30,000 per year per student in expenses to arsdigita.org and the number will probably grow a bit (for one thing, we're paying faculty $150,000/year).
I admit to secretly hoping that schools with $billions in the bank (e.g., Harvard and MIT) will find other ways to raise money than shaking down middle class families. But really the point of ArsDigita University is just what we say it is... to teach the undergrad CS curriculum to folks who might have missed it when they were in college studying liberal arts or biology or whatever.
We have roughly $40 million in the bank right now.
If you are qualified to work at ArsDigita (you've got a CS degree from a top school and have done the problem sets from our course at MIT), we will be delighted to pay your travel expenses plus a $10,000 signing bonus.
We offer living stipends to people who are really smart and really poor. As for those who had the bad luck to get double 200s on their SATs, wellll.... MIT doesn't take a risk on those folks and we don't want to say that we're smarter than the MIT admissions office.
Bottom line is that we will be no more or less elitist than MIT or Stanford.
- a data modeling and declarative query language (SQL)
- abstractions implemented in PL/SQL or Java running inside the RDBMS
- helper code implemented in C running inside the RDBMS or the Web server
We do some presentation and merging RDBMS data with graphic design templates in Tcl or the AOLserver templating language (ADP).Why do we use Tcl for this last step? We don't anymore. ArsDigita will build you a 100% pure Java site and support it. Our toolkit is about getting the data models and workflow models right, not about language religion. Beyond that, we use whatever is most expedient. It turns out that AOLserver is a great efficient proven Web development tool. It happened to include a compiled-in Tcl interpreter. So we used it. If we were as smart as you, we'd have rewritten the whole thing in Perl instead of building a $20 million (revenue) profitable business.
If you don't know about any of the advancements in computer technology developed at MIT over the last 40 years nor any of the useful innovative software systems written in Lisp, maybe you should take a computer history course.
Here's a fine example of how MIT turns out better engineers than Swarthmore. Elliot is whinging about Tcl and AOLserver while the engineers at AOL built a $120 billion business serving over 30,000 hits/second with AOLserver. Elliot hasn't bothered to check the arsdigita.com Web site (we've announced Apache and 100% Java versions of our toolkit, which really never used Tcl for much more than presentation; the Apache version is already up and running (it was authored by Robert Thau, the designer of the Apache module structure)).
If Elliot had looked at the curriculum, he'd have noticed that, just like MIT, we don't actually teach any computer languages. We expect the students to be bright enough to pick up the syntax as they learn the concepts (we might have to break the rules a tiny bit at http://arsdigita.org/university/ because we're introducing Java relatively early and Java has so much syntax and machinery).
As for teaching the "elite", Elliot, well we're sorry that we don't meet your standards. But with my piddling $1 million/year that I could afford to invest, we can't innovate too much. We're going to teach the Stanford/MIT stuff to people who had the qualifications necessary to get into Stanford and MIT in the same way (face-to-face education) used by Stanford and MIT. We're also going to let it all hang out on the Web for those who want to be monsters of self-motivation, but we don't judge ourselves by how well those folks learn.
Anyway, the bottom line Elliot is that if we had your intelligence and generosity, we could do more. But we don't so we're limited to just teaching 30 people/year in Cambridge for free.
Some of the folks who have applied to ArsDigita University already have MDs, for example, and they fit your profile of the "costing these people $125K". But others have history degrees from Ivy League colleges. High SAT scores + a Yale degree in humanities big bucks job. Even ArsDigita.com pays graduating CS nerds a mere $100,000.
:-)
But you're kind of missing the point. This isn't career prep. We don't teach C programming or Oracle DBA. We teach the standard MIT/Stanford-style CS curriculum. We want to teach people who are going to change the world in some interesting way, not get all excited about $125K one way or the other (that's kind of like a rounding error for someone skilled in IT).
On the social life score, all I can say is that we expect our students to enjoy the same rich social life enjoyed by top computer science students around the world
The original ACS stuff was built on Illustra, a commercialized version of Postgres. Postgres has some very nice features, e.g., tables that can inherit their structure from other tables. And in fact it would be very convenient to use these for ACS 4.0 (coming out in about two months).
But ultimately we gave up on Illustra because it wasn't reliable enough.
Oracle does have some very nice features of its own, e.g., the ability to run Java and PL/SQL inside the database. But I don't want to be remembered for pushing Oracle. In fact, I kind of walked away from their Web tools (we built www.comdex.com in 1996 using Oracle Webserver). They were clunkier and slower than AOLserver.
The thing to keep in mind is that the substrate layers don't matter. If you change out the RDBMS or the operating system or the HTTP server or the scripting language no end-user will care. But they care if the workflow or the data model is changed.
Not a God? Now I'm sad.
Not as sad as I was on that Boston Marathon day (when we got 30X the traffic that the customer told us to expect). But is that a failure for our toolkit? No. We had the equivalent of 8 400 MHz CPUs working on the Marathon server (two Sun E450s). If you can serve what seemed like half the US population with two Sun E450s using PHP, that's great. But so what?
There are people using ACS with a fat-ish db server plus a rack of small Web servers plus a load balancer. They don't seem to have any trouble scaling to arbitrary size.
"On really expensive boxes"? Photo.net handles 1 million hits/day, goes to the database on every page load, and runs on a computer with 4 180 MHz processors! There are 10-year-olds whose Quake machines would crush my server like a bug.
I am so sick of being the poster child for AOLserver (5 MB of code, smaller than the Oracle client library) and Tcl (which takes about two hours to learn). They are both open source, they don't get in the way, but if you want to use our toolkit (which is also free and open-source), you can now do it with Apache or with all-Java inside Oracle. Ben Adida ported it to PostgreSQL so you can be 100% open-source.
Anyway, if you want to start from scratch in MySQL and PHP and try to replicate the effort of ArsDigita's 80 full-time developers, be my guest. But don't confuse yourself into thinking that these are "solutions" (as you put it). They are tools.
The problem with giving students bad grades in courses is that (1) not only were they confused to begin with and didn't learn the material, but (2) they will be pissed off with you later! :-) Anyway, ACS has nothing to do with AOLserver or Tcl, really. SAP was written in COBOL initially. I'm sure a lot of language snobs threw rocks at them but at the end of the day a good engineer realizes that the value is in the data model and business process workflow. Now that ArsDigita has $20 million in revenue, we're releasing pure Java and Apache versions of ACS. So the anonymous coward (and former bad student) could have learned that his statements about being "forced" to develop in Tcl are simply wrong. All that he would have had to do is visit arsdigita.com. Anyway, the sad thing is that most people aren't good enough engineers to compare apples to apples. So they compare our toolkit, which is all about data models, to something like PHP, which is probably a fine programming language but it does not even try to to do the things that ACS does. On the scaling issue originally posted. People with sane tech architectures are usually able to rely on serving 10 dynamic requests/second/processor (these would involve a db query and a template merge). Could you do more than this? Sure! The real-time gamer guys build amazing stuff using UDP, custom C code, and in-memory databases of their own design. But what's the point for the average online community or ecommerce publisher? Most people with high traffic sites can afford a rack of processors and a load balancing switch. Anyway, I don't want to get into a flame war about AOLserver or Tcl. If you want to use our toolkit with pure Java running inside Oracle 8.1.7, go for it! You won't even need a separate Web server. If you want to use Apache instead of AOLserver, go for it! You'll probably need a slightly bigger machine but it won't really affect the end result. At ArsDigita, instead of trying to keep up with the latest in fashionable languages, we spend our time worrying about "What data models and workflow structures would we need to run the entire MIT Sloan School from a Web-based system?"
The HP Unix group did not give me a box because I wrote something nice about them in my first book! HP has been giving MIT various kinds of support for four decades or so. The photo.net server was given because we were (and still are) going to do an experiment with lots of user-uploaded photos. They were also interested in FlashPix (something HP has since abandoned). Anyway, the folks with whom I was working had nothing to do with HP-UX marketing.
.html extension) is actually hitting Oracle several times (to find out if there are comments and links on a page), REGEXPing, etc. We also use it to serve www.lcs.mit.edu and about 20 more sites (including http://software.arsdigita.com where you can look at and download all of our source code).
The K460 is a bit oversized for photo.net, but remember that what you see as a static URL (with a
As for America Online, they've not given me anything. They serve 28,000 hits/second with AOLserver and aren't all that interested in whether the rest of the world likes it. It works for them...
Well... it is probably true that MIT isn't dying to hire me this week. But as far as I can tell there isn't that much ill-will remaining from the days when I suggested that MIT faculty "move into the 1970s and install an RDBMS". They all woke up to the Web by late 1998 and since then I've been getting along remarkably well with the LCS faculty.
Well, I guess these quotes resonated with Perl weenies. Frankly, I'd forgotten having written them. Both Perl and Tcl are fine, I guess, if what you're doing is bridging the Web to an RDBMS (which is what I'm doing). If I were building another computer-aided engineering system (see my resume for what a loser I used to be), I'd get back into the language religious wars (I'd be choosing between Lisp and Java, I guess).
XML is a printed representation of structured data. RDBMS is a solution to the problems of atomic transactions, concurrency control, and isolation of users from seeing the results of incomplete transactions made by other users. See the db chapter of my book (available for free at photo.net) for more on this.
A lot of folks get confused on this point because journalists are so confused.
Uh, John, maybe you should read the book. I distribute a Perl script (for building an image library from a flat-file database). I talk a bit about Apache/mod_perl (not much since I haven't used it). I don't discourage anyone from using a technology that produces a reliable, responsive Web service for their users.
Instead of getting into a religious war about languages, we attack problems that we think are interesting (see http://arsdigita.com/projects.html ). Our students at MIT and our clients at ArsDigita don't want to hear about commodity software; they want to hear about innovative solutions.
This one really hurts. I run a small research project at the Lab for Computer Science (same building as the AI Lab). But I can't be a professor because I'm an officer (CEO actually) of arsdigita.com, a $6 million Internet services company. Given that ArsDigita is doubling every six months, I can't just wave goodbye to my friends here and kick back at MIT. Also, the MIT CS building is dog-unfriendly. So overall it isn't so bad to have the job that I do. The bottom line is that I designed and teach 6.916 and MIT undergrads and grad students can learn from it (so can everyone else since all the course materials are available free on the Web, including three textbooks, three psets, and all the lecture notes; Caltech, University of Munich, and NYU have already adopted the course or portions of the course). The students don't really care whether a teacher has a particular bureaucratic title or not.
Isn't GPL free enough? AOLserver 3.0 will be available under GPL (though personally I prefer to spend my time thinking about the user's problem (data model, flow)) than mucking about with someone else's C code.