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I have noticed that a mass mailing from the "Free Software Consortium" went out to most of the BC/Aberta LUG's and I would not be surprised to others across Canada as well. I have spent the past few hours snooping around their web site, whois records and any other info I can find and I would strongly suggest at this point that CLUG members review/consider their requests with a grain of salt. Although this assessment and recommendation is based on my own opinion and very little comprehensive research, there are a number of red flags that have been raised, at least for me. Some of them include: 1: Payment request of 250.00US 2: No evidence or list of existing members. 3: Grammer and writing style on site suggest that at the very least, not much care was taken in the preparation of the site and the accuracy of its content. 4: This paragraph on the site... "Scientific research has proven that Free Software is more reliable than Proprietary Software due to the cooperative effort involved in its creation as well as the competitive field that exists among creators which demands the production of high quality products." You dont have to be an academic/resercher to recognise the blatant errors in the "logic" of that statement....nothing is actually "proven" in the philsophical sense, in ANY scientific study....only a statistical preponderence of evidence to the contrary. ie "disproving the NULL". Not to mention the sweeping conclusion about security which I have never read anywhere...and I read HUGE volumes of tech info/news every day. 5: And a few other issues with how things are worded on the site. Give it a read for yourself and draw your own conclusions. At the very least DO NOT SEND ANY MONEY until we have more info on what this group is about. I had to write this very quick, busy like I am sure most of your are...Christmas stuff. So Merry Christmas to everyone, hold on to your money and lets hope for an even better Linux/OSS year for 2003. Cheers ________________________________ Open Enterprise Solutions Linux & Open Solutions for Business Johnny Stork, BA Calgary, AB Canada http://www.openenterprise.ca |
