Difference between revisions of "Eric S. Raymond"
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Revision as of 07:50, 14 June 2008
Eric S. Raymond is an advocate of open source software and the author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, a book making an economic case for open source written in incomprehensible businessese. He is also the author of The New Hacker's Dictionary, a repository of hacker culture (in the wizard programmer sense, not the 1337 sense).
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 essentially the same thing (Linux) but advocated from two different angles.
Idiotarians
Eric Raymond was one of those unfortunate souls who went completely nuts after 9/11. 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", proclaiming the duty of all good Americans to support George W. Bush and his transcendent crusade to crush "Islamofascism".
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.
He followed that up with some bizarre writings on race[1] and homosexuality[2] which suggest he has come completely off his hinges.
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.