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 strong support for the 2003 Iraq War has nettled some hackers, but he seems to enjoy the controversy this engenders.
Achievements
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-wrote the GNU ncurses library. He was the creator of the C implementation of the INTERCAL programming language parody.
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 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.
Criticism
Critics accuse Raymond of hijacking the free software movement for the sake of self promotion and profit. In that context it is argued that he has often worked to undermine other leaders/speakers of the movement. His forthright rejection of the moral and ethical arguments of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation in favor of a less idealistic (though arguably 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.
He has also been accused of directly selling out. 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 himself 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.
Raymond's claim to being a "Core Linux Developer" has drawn criticism since he has never had code accepted into Linux (the kernel), and his largest open source code contributions amount to portions of fetchmail, Ncurses, and Emacs (as well as a long list of small projects listed on his homepage). This lack of credentials led to a less-than-inspiring reception to his essay "Shut Up And Show Them The Code" which he levelled at Richard Stallman, the original author of Emacs, GCC, GDB, GNU Make, among other things.
Raymond addresses some of these assertions in his essay "Take My Job, Please!" , 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".
During the summer of 2003, Raymond expounded his opinions about politics, racial IQ differences , terrorism and the Iraq war on his blog, provoking much heated criticism. He has also been accused of modifying the Jargon file to reflect his own views about the war.
Books by Raymond
Movies with Raymond
Quote
- Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.
- — from "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"
- Anybody who has ever owned a dog who barked when strangers came near its owner's property has experienced the essential continuity between animal territoriality and human property. Our domesticated cousins of the wolf are instinctively smarter about this than a good many human political theorists.
- — from "Homesteading the Noosphere"
