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Coding Horror
programming and human factors
by Jeff Atwood

November 01, 2004

Free as in Beer

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:

sourceforge top downloads

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.

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Content (c) 2008 Jeff Atwood. Logo image used with permission of the author. (c) 1993 Steven C. McConnell. All Rights Reserved.