Eric S. Raymond

Categories: 1957 births | Free software | American hackers | American bloggers | Programmers | Technology writers

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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 as a historian/anthropologist of the 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 a strong interest in science fiction, 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. He also suffers from a mild form of congenital cerebral palsy [1].

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Achievements

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 open source software development activities have included maintaining the fetchmail email client, contributing editing modes to the Emacs editor and co-writing portions of the GNU ncurses library.

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.

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Criticism

Raymond initially became famous for his adoption of the Jargon File. Since then, many hackers have become dissatisfied by his centralized control over submissions to the File, the allegedly questionable additions and edits he has made, and the removal of certain terms on the grounds of being dated (unusual in historical dictionary projects). He has also been criticised for using the Jargon File as a vehicle for promoting his own political and social opinions. Particular instances that attracted much attention were the addition of tendentious pro-Iraq War and pro-gun ownership entries [2].

Critics accuse Raymond of hijacking the free software movement for the sake of self-promotion. It is argued that he has often worked to undermine other leaders/speakers of the movement. 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. He agreed to lecture at Microsoft [3], also increasing the friction, and is also said to have accepted stock options in return for giving VA Software credibility as their hired "moral compass". [4] [5]

When an apparently unsuspecting Microsoft recruiter (probably referred by someone as a joke) contacted Raymond in September 2005 "as someone who could potentially be a contributor at Microsoft", his response, incorrectly treating this as an actual offer of employment, 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?" This arguably brash assumption that he should be classed with Torvalds and Stallman (or that his importance to the open source community is analogous to that of the Pope to the Catholic Church) is typical of what many of Raymond's critics find disagreeable.

There has also been some acrimony between Raymond and Linux kernel developers, after the Linux project's refusal to incorporate CML2, an alternative kernel configuration system developed by Raymond. [6] [7] [8]

Furthermore, his temper has also caused some tension between himself and other Open Source advocates, most famously Bruce Perens. Perens made public a private threatening email he received from Raymond on the Debian mailing lists, citing concerns for his personal safety. [9] [10]

Raymond's claim to being a "Core Linux Developer" has also drawn criticism on the ground that he has never had any code accepted into the Linux kernel, and that the extent of his open source code contributions are relatively minor and arguably unimportant, amounting to little more than portions of fetchmail, Ncurses, and a few Emacs editing modes. This lack of credentials led to a derisive reception [11] of the essay "Shut Up And Show Them The Code", levelled at Richard Stallman, the original author of, among other things, Emacs, GCC, GDB, and GNU Make, some of the most important and widely used pieces of software in the world.

Raymond addresses some of these criticisms in his essay "Take My Job, Please!" [12], where he argues that if anyone 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 2003, Raymond stepped down as the president of the Open Source Initiative.

During the summer of 2003, Raymond expounded his opinions about politics, racial IQ differences [13], terrorism and the Iraq war on his weblog ([14] for instance), provoking much heated criticism.

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Eric S. Raymond (One Magazine photo shoot)
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Books by Raymond

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Movies with Raymond

  • Revolution OS, Linux Documentary with Eric S. Raymond on VHS/DVD
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External links

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References

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