[Fsfe-ie] Princeton troll

[adam beecher]

No doubt this is doing the rounds today. Read the full thing in it's
original format for best effect. :)

adam



Syllabus Magazine Wed., Nov. 5, 2003

The FREE, 0% APR, Better Sex, No Effort Diet

Howard Strauss

http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=8460

I AM MRS. HAJIAH HASSAN AHMED, THE WIFE OF LATE CHIEF ALHAJI HASSAN
AHMED...I SEEK IN CONFIDENCE THAT YOU ASSIST ME TO INVEST THIS US$34,000,000
FUND. I HAVE RESOLVED TO DEPART 25% OF THE TOTAL SUM TO YOU FOR YOUR
ASSISTANCE IN THIS TRANSACTION SECURED BY YOUR GOOD FAITH DEPOSIT OF
US$5,000.

Few of us would rush to send Mrs. Ahmed the $5,000 she asks for in return
for a promised $8.5 million. This is clearly the mythical free lunch; a
scam; a pitch that promises something for nothing; a special deal only for
us. We are all much too sophisticated to believe that millions of dollars
will fall into our laps with no effort on our part—or are we? Many of us buy
the following scams where perhaps the lack of all caps serves to disguise
them.

Free Software

Why buy expensive software or spend millions to develop it yourself? You can
get complex systems at absolutely NO COST! Yes, instead of having highly
paid programmers at Microsoft, IBM, Sun, or even Blackboard build your
critical university systems, you can have scores of software gurus scattered
around the globe working completely independently build them for you FOR
FREE. These folks are some of the same great people who are supposed to be
working for you anyway, plus a smattering of teenagers too young to work at
Redmond, hackers, virus creators, and a menagerie of others with whom you
will feel great pride in entrusting your IT infrastructure.

This is the alluring pitch of open source software. We may have to give up
project planning, quality control, coding standards, accountability, version
control, and support, but it’s FREE and we get the ability to modify the
source code ourselves, something that is extremely dangerous to do, was
discredited decades ago, and few people do anyway.

[...]