Open Source: The FREE, 0% APR, Better Sex, No Effort Diet: Howard Strauss, Princeton’s manager of technology strategy and outreach (no less!) takes aim at free software in their ‘Syllabus’ magazine. He launches a few ad hominems while he’s at it:
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.
Given that Princeton’s OIT uses SpamAssassin, I guess that means he reckons I, and the other developers, are ‘teenagers too young to work at Redmond’, or ‘virus creators’. Thanks muchly, Princeton!
It sounds like a joke, but I actually think he’s serious. My
recommendation: he needs to take a job in the software-development side of
such companies as ‘Microsoft, IBM, Sun, or even Blackboard’ to see how
well the commercial software development methodology really works.
Hint: from the outside, you don’t hear the half of it ;)
Oh — regarding ‘teenagers too young to work at Redmond’: this /. comment is worth noting.