Did you request access to the source? They are not open as advertised, granted, but they are also not closed as people seem to assume. I heard of ripple, thought it was cool, had my aha moment, planned a service. Now, to do this properly I had to get the source, so I asked... and now I do have access to the source. I mean, c'mon, you don't have to like it, you don't have to use it, but just asking sometimes takes you a long way.
Doesn't matter - that is not the point.
My point is that they are trying to sell their idea to the public while lying about what the idea is really about.
I don't care about whether ripple is open or closed. I only care about if it is advertised as such.
Now to your point; scammers don't lie, scammers scam. Liars are the ones lying, and while scammers are certainly liars, they are so much more that that. I'm sure you have lied more than once in your life. Heck, I'm almost certain you have lied more than once in the past hour, but that doesn't make you a scammer, does it?
I disagree.
When you first lie to get people into your project and then profit from it - that is already scamming, because people lost their funds and their time to use your fake scammy project. That is already scamming.
See, that's something I can not agree with. Lying to get the public to come in and throw money at you, sure. But stating they'll be open just not right now to drive adoption? I'm really happy they decided to do the open beta phase and not just play alone until the opening of the source! Ripple is a hard concept to grasp and the "SCAM you can make your our currency" claims explain just how hard the concept is.
Just like Bitcoin, though in a more social and less technical way, Ripple is pushing the responsibility of using the system to the people using the system, i.e. be careful of who you trust, thing about what you are transacting, etc. Sure, it can be abused, it will be abused, has probably been abused already. But just saying "don't use it because OpenCoin (the devs, the early adopters) will profit more" is like saying the early bitcoin adopters or heavy investors are scamming the ones that use bitcoin as currency... really?