Free as in Beer

November 1, 2004

Here's a data point supporting my hypothesis that users will jump through any hoops to get things for free as in beer. It's the SourceForge top downloads list:

Seven of the ten top downloads are pure p2p file sharing clients. The other three directly relate to media ripping. Somehow I doubt freedom of speech is high on most users' priority lists.

Even running as a non-Administrator account is unlikely to protect users from the fifty percent of shared executables that contain malicious code.