Free Software As Nigerian Scam 685
djeaux writes "In the November 4 issue of Syllabus, Howard Strauss, manager of technology strategy and outreach at Princeton University, presents 'The FREE, 0% APR, Better Sex, No Effort Diet' in which he scattershoots at open source software. The Nigerian scam is part of his imagery, leading to a great quote: 'While you are installing your free open source software you may want to write Mrs. Ahmed a check. Her $8.5 million will help pay for the real cost of that free software.' Elsewhere, Strauss describes the open source community as '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.'" Not everyone at Princeton agrees.
Article in case of /.'ing (Score:0, Informative)
The FREE, 0% APR, Better Sex, No Effort Diet
Howard Strauss
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.
Yes, PeopleSoft is very expensive and those greedy folks at WebCT expect to make a profit, but they have to pay for quality software to be developed and so do we! We either pay commercial software developers, pay to build it ourselves, or pay the even higher price to manage and maintain FREE open source software. Who cares how much we have to spend as long as they say it's free--or nearly so. While you are installing your free open source software you may want to write Mrs. Ahmed a check. Her $8.5 million will help pay for the real cost of that free software.
Free Labor
Another way to get free software is to have students develop our critical systems. We all know how clever students are and how being born in the computer age they have bypassed a million years of evolution to become cyber sapiens. Software development is instinctive to them. While your aging, over-21 staff demands high salaries and benefits, and fusses with security, documentation, and project planning, cyber sapiens work for a few dollars an hour and can manage several projects in their heads without writing a single thing down. They also write bug-free code, work during exams and vacations, and are not distracted by alcohol, sports, or the acquisition of potential mates. Best of all, students do not tie up your expensive equipment. They can develop and run your systems on their own dorm computers where their cyber sapien friends can do quality assurance with your confidential data. It is no wonder that we are so sad to see 25 percent of our students leave each year, abandoning their superbly crafted systems. Your IT staff will let you know that as geriatric non-cyber sapiens they can't manage these orphaned student-developed systems so they must be passed on to the next class of cyber sapiens.
Free Market
You can also get free software developed by having your users develop it for you. Really, users are no dummies and if they are there are books just for them on every imaginable subject. Buying users copies of SQL for Dummies ($17.49 at Amazon.com) is a lot cheaper than having your expensive IT staff write a whole bunch of reports for them in SQL. Empower your users! Give th
Re:You are one fast typist . (Score:1, Informative)
Looks like you are wrong. Ann Coulter got first post.
Direct link to Reader Response forum: (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Attitude (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I let this particular parody get to me .... (Score:5, Informative)
- No more institution centric home page
- There should only be one portal. (don't want the students using Yahoo! or
Excite - we want them to use our portal)
- There must exist -complete- customization available to the user. Otherwise, they will continue to use another portal that allows them to do what they want.
- Replaces your desktop
Some of the neat terminology Howard creates: Cameos: Small pieces of data from larger data set and most important, the most important challenge isn't technical, it is requiring all data owners to work together.Congrats Howard, get your closed source, proprietary formats working together. GOD this guy is listed as a futurist! Here's another damn article about portals in 2015 [elibrary.com]. JEEZ give it a break.
Who is Linux & Open Source? (Score:5, Informative)
and as for programming experience
- 4 had 1 year
- 10 had 2-4 years
- 31 had 5-9 years
- 40 had 10-20 years
- 16 had 20+ years
Then there is the Boston Consulting Group's Hacker Survey [osdn.com], which found Occupation Chart [osdn.com]Hardly what Howard Strauss's article portrays.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Informative)
Did I mention that I love my regular internet service outages?
Look at the CREN site and Google (Score:3, Informative)
Google is your friend (Score:3, Informative)
source:
http://www.marietta.edu/~mcevents/IMC_2_12_03.pdf
manager of Technology Strategy and Outreach at Princeton University.
A graduate of Drexel University and Carnegie Mellon University
previously employed by the Johnson Space Center of NASA and by Bell Telephone Laboratories
And the scariest one of all:
Strauss has authored several IT courses and is an information technology consultant for many companies and universities.
Yikes!
About Howard and Princeton (Score:5, Informative)
I intend to write his boss. I mean, I appreciate satire and parody, but as everyone has pointed out, his article is just malicious and factually false. It's filled with ad hominem attacks at students, hackers, the whole open source community. All based on a ridiculous metaphor that doesn't hold. Hell, it doesn't even make sense. If he hates young people so much, why in the world would he work in an "outreach" capacity at a university?!
Interestingly, his department is responsible for serving the notorious PeopleSoft management and purchasing software here....roundly hated by every administrative person I know at Princeton. I only mention this because he specifically mentions PeopleSoft. OIT at Princeton is definitely a mixed bag--some outstanding services, people, and liberties (including, yes, plenty of linux support)--and some horrible policies and red tape (like, charging for every ethernet box they activate--both for students and in the depts!--AND charging for every device attached to the network! They nickle and dime like crazy).
Re:Pessimist Professor (Score:3, Informative)
ECMAScript + SMIL (Score:5, Informative)
ECMAScript [wikipedia.org] is the non-trademark name for standardized JavaScript. SMIL doesn't appear to be supported by Mozilla yet, and I think most of what it can do can be done in ECMAScript + those other technologies (except changeing the volume on sound clips)
Re:I let this particular parody get to me .... (Score:3, Informative)
And SVG doesn't surpass Flash, it's an entirely different concept. SVG is making vector graphics and animation usable as design tools. In the effect it'll have on the functionality of a lot of web pages, especially when viewed on handhelds and phones, it's definately a revolution, but it's not anything like an improvement on Flash.
Technically, you could turn a SVG file into a
It's not an animation tool, trying to do Homestar Runner in SVG would kill you and be so inefficient that you'd be better off doing the whole thing with animated GIFs.
Re:Wow (Score:4, Informative)
Just like proprietary software, open source software varies widely in its quality, and in the maturity of the development process. There are projects (like MySQL, Apache, gcc, Tomcat, Mozilla, etc.) that have astoundingly good regression test suites. Heck, check a change into the Mozilla source code tree and it'll automatically be compiled and regression tested (hundreds of tests) on all supported hardware and OS platforms, with a pretty web page pointing out who broke what when, not to mention a killer defect tracking database. Of course, there are also open source projects that aren't as mature, but then there are proprietary products with bad quality as well.
In my experience the code quality of open source projects is better than proprietary code, because the developers are more afraid of having "the world" see bad code than they are of having "their boss" see bad code. Peer pressure, in this case, is a wonderful thing. Also, engineers on open source projects are typically more responsive than in closed source software product companies, because they can be (no marketing or management barriers) -- only the smallest software companies are as responsive to customers as open source developers, for the same reason.
The 'danger' in using an open source project is that you might use a project without many other users, or have problems that nobody else cares about, in which case you'll have to fix it yourself. You can manage this by making sure that the project is active, and that your application is "typical." If you're company 1M using Apache, there's no risk. If you're company 1 using RandomProject, you're going to run into bumps. Of course, the same is true of proprietary software products, though it's a little harder to find out the real situation, particularly with small companies, so you have to do some digging.
The 'danger' is using a closed source product is that you can't fix the problems yourself, only beg a vendor to fix them (which they often charge professional service fees for!), if they decide to fix the problem at all, on their time schedule. You can manage this by making sure that you pay maintenance, and that you completely rewrite the software license to ensure that the product conforms to the documentation, and that there are response times and financial to give some teeth to make sure that the vendor has the right incentives to make you successful. Never, ever sign a software license as written by any software company -- they're absurdly slanted towards the vendor.
Re:yeesh, talk about article -1troll (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I let this particular parody get to me .... (Score:2, Informative)
Back like in producing [eclipse.org] lots [ibm.com] of free software?
Did OSS start as a "pet project"? Maybe. But now, for many, is just a tool to make money. A lot of of money. The fact that the community is also beneffited is "collateral damage" for them.
Suprising (Score:3, Informative)
If I interpreted him correctly, his idea seems to be that the lure of open source software is the lack of licensing cost but this lure is too good to be true. As a result IT managers should not shrink from spending large amounts of money on propritary solutions.
He points out that the actual cost of managing and supporting an open source solution is not free. Thank you Capitan Obvious. Any IT manager worthy of the title would understand this. In fact a proper IT manager would factor in support costs, licensing cost, expected lifespan, risk to operation, expected user base, security and many ofther factors before making a decision on a particular solution. In some instances open source would be chosen, in others not.
To make a case against open source software, Strauss could have chosen some of those factors and provided examples where open source failed. He could have provided hypothetical situations in which the ability to modify source would be dangerous. Instead he chose the "Attack by Bad Analogy". While an analogy can be useful to illuminate a line of reasoning in an argument, it is no replacement for an argument. Indeed, an over-reliance on analogy is generaly a signal that the person lacks a clear understanding of the issue being debated. I would certainly expect better from a publication whose intended audience is involved in higher education.
Strauss goes on to discourage the use of student written software and the idea of user customization. Again, lacking any clear argument, anaolgy is used.
The ability to evaluate software solutions and choose the best fit for the problem is a critical skill for IT managers. A useful article could have explored the particular issues associated with evaluating open-source soultions. Instead a poorly argued rant occupies the space. Hopefully Strauss's article is the exception rather than the rule for the pulication.
support - the real world (Score:4, Informative)
I also tend to get bug fixes faster and mroe timely than I do from commercial software vendors.
Of course YMMV, but personnally I tend to find OSS offers a better quality of support all round. Sure I can't sue anyone, but then in the 10 years or so I've been using OSS I can't think of any reason why I would want to. Now if think of the times I'd like to through a shed load of lawyers at a commercial vendor (no, not necessarily M$)....
Perhaps its because it is a 'hobby' for alot of the OSS people, they take a greater pride in their work and become more emotionally attached to the work and therefore 'care' more about the product.
Persoannly I'd like the man justify his claims
Re:I let this particular parody get to me .... (Score:3, Informative)
To suggest 'decades' doesn't fit in with history. 'Years', maybe. 'Decades' means he's exaggerating at best, not something to do in an article meant to be viewed as objective, wrong, or just plain talking out of his arse.
Dear Mr. Strauss (Score:2, Informative)
Did it ever occur to you that there MIGHT be people in this world that are not Self Centered, Paranoid, Money Grubbing, and Power Hungry ? Open source software is supported by companies that feel that open standards are better than propriatary ones, ever heard of ASCII? Which is is more widely used ASCII (open standard) or EBCDIC (IBM propriatary)? Open Source software is also supported by software developers that: A) Enjoy writing software, B) Wish to contribute something back to the computing community. (By the way item B is the core ideal of most societies.)
I am sure that these points have already been raised here at
Roy Owen
Software Developer/Engineer
Re:I let this particular parody get to me .... (Score:3, Informative)
small clarification (Score:2, Informative)
That should read more like "I package a large set of open source programs and libraries, developed by CERN, for the Debian GNU/Linux project...". Obviously I didn't want to imply that CERN wrote this software specifically for Debian. It was 2 am when I wrote the above...
Re:E-mail to Mr. Strauss (Score:1, Informative)
I am out of the office from Monday, November 3 thru Friday, November 7 returning on Monday 11/10/03. Contact Lee Varian (lvarian@princeton.edu) or Sally Van Fleet (sallyv@princeton.edu (609)258-2908)if you need to contact me.
Please leave your message and I will handle it when I return. I may not be able to check my e-mail reliably while I'm away.
-Howard