I read your article, its nice and informative about the practical problems of open source. Well, I am new with open source and trying to learn. I have to do a project for my university. Could you please send me any practical code for open source that I can include in my project. I will be very thankful for the help and support.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Laziest person in the world award
I normally don't blog about non-open source stuff but this one takes the cake. This is a mail from a student who reads my blog. Notice the nice attempt at flattery in the first sentence followed by an utterly spineless request. If this is the quality of our students, god help us!
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Could you please send me any practical code for open source that I can include in my project. I will be very thankful for the help and support.
The whole point of Free Software is that the source code is free, and this fellow wants you to send the code to him?
LOL!
Well, in the end, Sourceforge is FULL of code from Eight Sem Projects.
Oh wait, let me rephrase that.
Eight Sem Projects are FULL of code from Sourceforge.
PS: I'm about to start my eight sem project. There is quite a racket going on. You can buy nice projects for about 6k. Laziness especially goes up in eight sem as everyone has a job offer already.
"If this is the quality of our students, god help us!"
Trust me - it is even worse :-(. At least that's the impression I have after 4 years through the grind. There are definitely some bright engineering students out there, but most of the bunch is simply awful.
Hi Venky,
I run an Orkut forum, it's got about 10k+ members mostly from Asia.
I see this type of behaviour all the time in our forum - it was bad enough trying to stamp out the subject lines with "Please help" but like you I am amazed at some of the requests.
I'm not sure if this is a cultural thing or just that new kids are getting used to making these requests with no apparent understanding of how it a) portrays them and b) the reaction it creates. The traits of selfishness and ignorance of consequences can often be attributed to youth.
My guess, more often than not is that this is often a young teenager's desire to short cut their homework challenges and the kids in the playground share their stories on how they got some 'guru' to help them out with their latest assignment.
Sometimes however, it's someone who is doing a professional job and is uncapable of delivering what they have been hired to do which also amazes me but there's plenty of blaggers in this world and it does not surprise me that we get to see more of them through the transparency of the internet.
There are millions of students in india who come from backgrounds of hardship and poverty. If they want to learn more about free software they try to ask others about it first as most people in india seem todo.
And then they try to seek guidance from self claimed gurus of open source like you. You claim on your blog profile that you believe that wonderful tools like the Internet and the computer should not be the preserve of the English speaking elite in India.
Why do you mock those who are asking you to learn more? Looks like you are part of the elite who arrogantly think that everyone asking is lazy and spineless.
You don't seem to be any less spineless and arrogant yourself. Perhaps you should learn more and practice less arrogance.
Dear Anonymous,
It is possible that I am wrong. However, aren't students supposed to write their own code instead of asking a random person to send them code? Getting others to do the homework they have to do as part of their studies is not excusable behavior.
Maybe, I misunderstood the person's question?
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