Eric S. Raymond
From RationalWiki
Eric S. Raymond is an advocate of open source software and the author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, an essay explaining why the Linux operating system should be called GUN/Linux[1][2]. (The essay also — unintentionally, of course — makes an economic case for open source software.[3]) He's also been an avid advocate for the proliferation of guns in American society, taking a strong stand against gun control.
He is also the self-appointed maintainer of the Jargon File, a repository of hacker culture (in the wizard programmer sense, not the 1337 sense) that originated in the DEC PDP computer cultures of 1970s computer labs at universities like MIT and Stanford, but under Raymond's maintenance has become rather Unix-centric and no longer specifically representative of the culture from which it originated. For this reason he is listed as the author of The New Hacker's Dictionary, a book reproducing the Jargon File, with Raymond's additions and changes, in text form.
Raymond is also known for writing an e-mail retrieval utility, fetchmail, which has drawn criticism for, among other things, containing many security vulnerabilities[4][5] and for essentially abandoning it when it reached a point that he considered "finished". His experience coding fetchmail features prominently in The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
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[edit] Open Source
Raymond helped popularize the Open Source movement and term partially out of frustration with the Free Software Foundation and its leading light, Richard Stallman. The difference is one of political style more than substance. Raymond's political and economic views are anarcho-libertarian and right-wing; Stallman's are green, left-progressive, and anti-corporate.
Open Source and Free Software are legally the same thing, but advocated from two different angles; Open Source attempted to separate the machinery of Free Software from its politics, so the likes of Raymond could participate in it without feeling any discomfort about consorting with those for whom Free Software had a "disagreeable" political motive.
It can be argued that the Open Source movement helped gain respectability for the Free Software movement. The Cathedral and the Bazaar popularized the aggressively collaborative development model that is now par for the course, but was originally started by Linus Torvalds, whom Stallman believes to be leading people astray from the True Path of Free Software. As we shall see, though, even to the extent that Raymond is right, that makes him at best a stopped clock.
[edit] i am slowly going crazy one two three four five six switch
Eric Raymond was one of those unfortunate souls who went completely nuts after 9/11. He has thusly turned from a respected thinker with some good and some extreme ideas into a paranoid headcase, who sees Islamist and Communist conspiracies everywhere, and who is the perfect example of the ancient proverb stating that those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. This self-proclaimed "anarchist" turned overnight into a nuke-the-Middle-East fanatic and began posting tedious manifestos to teh Internets such as "The Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto"[6], proclaiming the duty of all good Americans to support George W. Bush and his transcendent crusade to crush "Islamofascism".
[edit] Idiotarian, n. Anyone who isn't a trigger-happy neocon/libertarian.
Raymond's "idiotarians" include consistent anti-war Libertarians (such as himself before 9/11), "idiotarians of the left" (the peace movement and antiwar Democrats), "idiotarians of the right" (conspiracy theorists and those like Jerry Falwell suggesting 9/11 was God's punishment of America), and anyone else not fully on board with invading Iraq. The term and concept quickly spread to pro-war bloggers, who have continued the tactic of lumping together the peace movement and antiwar Democrats and Libertarians with David Duke, Lyndon LaRouche, Fred Phelps, far-left Communist cults, 9/11 conspiracy theories, etc. as all being part of the same anti-war tent. See also: Conservapedia's description of Fred Phelps as a liberal activist. This tactic is used to discredit the peace movement and mainstream opposition to the war. Thankfully nobody's buying it anymore.
[edit] Why is it that my tinfoil hat always seems to not quite fit right?
He followed that up with some bizarre writings on race[7], homosexuality[8], and HIV denial[9], which suggest he has come completely off his hinges.
He has suggested that Barack Obama's victory in the 2008 Presidential race was due to voter fraud and the mainstream media's ability to mask Obama's weaknesses.[10] Never mind the fact that, in 2004, he himself stated that the mainstream media lost its power to sway elections.[11] He also believes that just because it happens to be his blog, he can have the privilege of committing the grossest forms of logical fallacies without anyone having the right to call him on them[12] and that all liberals lend support to the killing of "anyone who ever bought an SUV or voted Republican."[13]. He has also gone full circle and become a full-blown Internet troll when arguing in favor of gun rights.[14]
In late 2009, he came out on the side of global warming denialists amid the controversy surrounding the leaking of email communications between climate scientists from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit.[15] [16] One of the comments in said post makes it very obvious that ESR is the kind of person who will add 2 and 2 and come up with a Communist plot.[17] (Really? KGB psyops? Have they been shooting their mind control beams at you, Eric?)
In early 2010, in the wake of Pat Robertson's ridiculous remarks regarding the Haitian people's supposed pact with Satan, ESR wrote a blog post suggesting that the Haitian people really did summon up the Voudon god Ogun to kill off all the white Frenchmen[18]. Of course, his source is a stultifying right-wing conservative website, so whom will you believe?
[edit] Biting the hand that feeds him (and quite a few others as well)
The worst part of all is that he blames Alan Turing for his judicial punishment and suicide, even though Raymond, like other computer programmers, owes Turing his career.[19] This in turn came up in the context of an article blaming a young woman for her suicide because she was a very individualistic person (an artistic tomboy who was often accused of being a lesbian); the logic was that Raymond himself, who grew up suffering from cerebral palsy, was strong enough to put up with teasing, so everyone else who dares be an individual should be strong enough to put up with it too. Make of that what you will.
His writings make most sense as the ravings of someone who believes that America is the greatest country in the world and that all other countries are run by little girls.[20]
His influence and involvement in Open Source advocacy has, needless to say, been greatly diminished and he is now best known as a notorious Internet crank, leaving Stallman to fight the ninjas alone.[21]
[edit] External Links
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ http://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/archive/gun-linux
- ↑ Richard Stallman#Stallman and (GNU/)Linux
- ↑ http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/
- ↑ http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=585008+0+archive/2001/freebsd-arch/20010218.freebsd-arch
- ↑ http://pyropus.ca/software/getmail/faq.html#faq-about-why
- ↑ http://www.catb.org/~esr/aim/
- ↑ http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=129
- ↑ http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=26
- ↑ http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=184
- ↑ http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=586
- ↑ http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=154
- ↑ http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=651#comment-229615
- ↑ http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=651#comment-229610
- ↑ http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1029
- ↑ http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1447
- ↑ http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/12/quote_mining_code.php
- ↑ http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1447#comment-243073
- ↑ http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1573
- ↑ http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1046#comment-236592
- ↑ http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=906
- ↑ http://xkcd.com/225/
