Eric S. Raymond
Eric S. Raymond
Eric Steven Raymond (born December 4, 1957) (often referred to by his initials, 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 the most famous (and controversial) hackers.
Raymond is an avowed libertarian. He is known to have a strong interest in science fiction, is an enthusiastic amateur musician, and has a black belt in taekwondo. His public advocacy of Second Amendment gun rights and belligerent support for the 2003 Iraq War has nettled some hackers, but he seems to enjoy the controversy this engenders.
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2 Criticism 3 Books by Raymond 4 Movies with Raymond 5 External links 6 Quote |
Born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1957, Raymond lived on three continents and forgot two languages before settling in Pennsylvania in 1971. His involvement with hacker culture began in 1976, and he wrote his first open source project in 1982.
He is the author of the fetchmail POP client. He has contributed many editing modes to the EMACS editor and co-written the GNU ncurses library. He was the creator of the C implementation of the INTERCAL programming language.
Raymond coined the sentence, "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 [1] archives the earliest source (1997), originally distributed freely on the Internet. In addition to this, he maintains a dozen FAQs and writes lots of essays.
After 1997 Raymond became a principal theorist in the open-source movement and one of the founders of the Open Source Initiative. He also took on
the role of ambassador of open source to the press, business and mainstream culture. He is a gifted speaker with the delivery (and, perhaps, ego) of a stand-up comic, 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 hacker.
Raymond's tactics have scored a number of remarkable successes, beginning with
the release of the Mozilla source code in 1998, and he is widely credited by both hackers and mainstream observers with having taken the open source mission to Wall Street more effectively than anyone before him.
Despite his public achievements, Raymond has attracted a fair amount of criticism. Many critics accuse him of hijacking the free software movement for the sake of self promotion and profit. In that context, he has, it is argued, often worked to undermine other leaders/speakers of the movement. His forthright rejection of the moral and ethical arguments of RMS and the Free Software Foundation in favor of a more pragmatic, market-friendly stance, has exacerbated some pre-existing political tensions in the community. There has also been some acrimony between Raymond and Linux developers, after the Linux project's refusal to incorporate CML2, an alternative kernel configuration system developed by Raymond, largely due to Raymond's refusal to play along with the rules and conventions
of Linux kernel development, and his apparent assumption that the patch would be
accepted based on his credentials, rather than technical merit.
He has also, on several occasions, been accused of directly selling out. For instance, he agreed to lecture at Microsoft in return for the opportunity to meet a couple of his favorite science fiction authors. In addition, he accepted millions of dollars in stock options in return for giving VA Research/VA Linux Systems credibility as their hired "moral compass".
Furthermore, his temper has also caused some tension between Raymond and other Open Source advocates, most famously Bruce Perens. Perens made public a private email threat he received from Raymond on the Debian mailing lists, citing safety concerns. [1]
Raymond addresses some of these assertions in his essay Take My Job, Please! [1], where he argues that if anyone qualified is willing to take his job and present the case for open source to the world, he would "back them to the hilt".
During the summer of 2003, Eric Raymond posted extensively on his blog his strong views about politics, terrorism and the Iraq war and provoking much heated criticism. He has also been accused [1] of modifying the Jargon file to reflect his own views about the war.
Achievements
Criticism
Books by Raymond
Movies with Raymond
External links
Parodies
Quote