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Eric S. Raymond

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Eric S. Raymond

Eric Steven Raymond (born December 4, 1957), often referred to as ESR, is the author of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" and the present maintainer of the "Jargon File" (also known as "The New Hacker's Dictionary"). Though the Jargon File established his original reputation within hacker culture, after 1997 he became a leading figure in the open source movement, and is today one of its most famous (and controversial) characters.

Raymond is an avowed libertarian. He is known to have strong interests in science fiction and firearms, is an enthusiastic amateur musician, and has a black belt in taekwondo. His advocacy of Second Amendment gun rights and support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq has nettled many, but he seems to enjoy the controversy those positions engender. [1].

Biography

Born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1957, Raymond lived on three continents before settling in Pennsylvania in 1971. His involvement with hacker culture began in 1976 and he contributed to his first open source project in 1982. Since then, his primary contribution to open source software has been maintaining the fetchmail email client. Minor contributions have included Emacs editing modes and portions of libraries like GNU ncurses, giflib/libungif, and libpng. He has also written a number of HOWTO documents that are now included in the Linux Documentation Project corpus. Raymond suffers from a mild form of congenital cerebral palsy.

Raymond coined the aphorism "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." He credits Linus Torvalds with the inspiration for this quotation, which he dubs "Linus's law". The mainstream source for the quotation is his 1999 book The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary, Sebastopol, California: O'Reilly & Associates; but his website archives the earliest source (1997), originally distributed freely on the Internet. "Cathedral" is generally considered to be his most important work. ESR is also a prolific publisher of essays and opinion pieces, many of which are political in nature, through his website and blog.

After 1997 Raymond became a prominent voice in the open source movement and was one of the founders of the Open Source Initiative. He also took on the self-appointed role of ambassador of open source to the press, business and mainstream culture. He is a gifted speaker and has taken his road show to more than fifteen countries on six continents. He is routinely quoted in the mainstream press, and as of 2003 has probably achieved more public visibility than almost any other open source advocate.

Raymond and his supporters have credited his tactics with a number of remarkable successes, beginning with the release of the Mozilla (then Netscape) source code in 1998, and he is widely credited with having taken the open source mission to Wall Street more effectively than earlier advocates.

Criticism

Raymond has attracted a substantial degree of personal criticism for his actions. His public behaviour has often been considered self-aggrandising, giving rise to accusations that he has used the free software movement as a vehicle for self promotion. He has also been involved in high-profile conflicts with various software development communities, who have expressed concerns about his methods and motives.

Jargon File

Raymond initially became known for his adoption of the Jargon File. Since then, many hackers have become dissatisfied by the resulting character of the work. This dissatisfaction centers on the fact that, despite the fact that the Jargon File is meant to be an impartial record of "hacker culture", Raymond has included a number of terms that were invented by himself, or reflect his own strong political views.

Clashes with other free software personalities

Raymond has had a number of high-profile public disagreements with other prominent figures in the free software movement. In particular, his disagreement with Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation's views on the ethics of free software in favour of a more market-driven stance has exacerbated some pre-existing tensions in the community.

His behaviour has also caused tension between himself and other Open Source advocates, most famously Bruce Perens. Perens made public a private physically threatening email he received from Raymond on the Debian mailing lists, citing concerns for his personal safety. [2] [3]

ESR as "Core Linux Developer"

Raymond's public claims to being a "Core Linux Developer" are widely disputed, since he has never had any code accepted into the Linux kernel. In fact, his sole attempt to contribute to Linux (the CML2 configuration system) was rejected by Linux kernel developers, with some acrimony at what was seen as a high-handed attempt to force an inferior personal project on the kernel development community. Many kernel developers were irritated by the fact that, when it became clear that the project would not be accepted, Raymond appealed to people outside the kernel development community to place pressure on kernel developers to ensure CML's acceptance. [4][5][6]

"Shut Up And Show Them The Code"

In his essay "Shut Up And Show Them The Code"[7], Raymond criticizes Richard Stallman over tactics to promote open source software. The premise of this article -- that Stallman should stop vocally promoting free software, and concentrate on "showing them the code" -- falls apart when it is realised that Stallman is the original author of some of the most widely used and sophisticated pieces of free software in the world, including Emacs, GCC, GDB, and GNU Make.

Raymond's own primary code contribution to the Free and Open Source world has been a electronic mail utility, fetchmail. [8] A more complete list of Raymond's accomplishments, in light of "Shut Up And Show Them The Code", has been compiled in the critical essay, "The Emperor Has No Clothes".

Microsoft recruiting incident

When an apparently unsuspecting Microsoft recruiter contacted Raymond in September 2005 to suggest an interview, his response was typical: "What were you going to do with the rest of your afternoon, offer jobs to Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds? Or were you going to stick to something easier, like talking Pope Benedict XVI into presiding at a Satanist orgy?" Raymond also called himself Microsoft's "worst nightmare". This casual equation of himself with Torvalds and Stallman exemplifies what many of Raymond's critics find disagreeable.

Politics

Since the summer of 2003, Raymond has used his weblog [9] to promote his views on politics, race and the Iraq war. Controversial opinions that he has attempted to defend include, for example, that African Americans are responsible for a disproportionate percentage of crimes because they have lower IQs [10], and that the United States should embark on a campaign of "deliberate cultural genocide" against the Islamic world [11].

Raymond's Response to Critics

Raymond addressed some of his critics from the software development community in his 1999 essay "Take My Job, Please!" [12], stating that if anyone else is qualified and willing to take his job and present the case for open source to the world, he would "back them to the hilt". In February 2005, Raymond stepped down as the president of the Open Source Initiative. This section briefly summarises some of the most prominent criticisms leveled at Raymond.

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Eric S. Raymond (One Magazine photo shoot)

Books by Raymond

  • The New Hacker's Dictionary (editor) (MIT Press, paperback ISBN 0-262-68092-0, cloth ISBN 0-262-18178-9) — printed version of the Jargon file
  • The Cathedral and the Bazaar (O'Reilly; hardcover ISBN 1565927249, October 1999; paperback ISBN 0596001088, January 2001) — includes "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", "Homesteading the Noosphere", "The Magic Cauldron" and "Revenge of the Hackers"
  • The Art of Unix Programming (Addison-Wesley, October 2003; paperback ISBN 0131429019)


Wikiquote has quotations related to Eric S. Raymond.

References

  1. ^ Eric S. Raymond (September 14). "Dancing With The Gods". Eric's Home Page. Individual. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= and |year= / |date= mismatch (help); Unknown parameter |publishyear= ignored (help)
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