Eric S. Raymond

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Eric S. Raymond (FISL 6.0, Porto Alegre, Brazil)

For the villain from the animated television series Jem, see Eric Raymond (villain).

Eric Steven Raymond (born December 4, 1957), often referred to as ESR, is a computer programmer, author and advocate for the open source movement. His reputation within hacker culture was established when he became the maintainer of the "Jargon File". After the 1997 publication of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", Raymond became a high-profile representative of the open source movement, and is today one of its most recognized and controversial characters.

Other than his computing interests, Raymond is an avowed anarcho-capitalist and supporter of the Libertarian Party. He is known to have strong interests in science fiction and firearms, is an enthusiastic amateur musician, and has a black belt in taekwondo. He is an advocate of the Second Amendment right to bear arms^[1] and supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Raymond identifies himself religiously as a neopagan,^[2] is an initiate witch and coven leader.^[3]

Raymond has a mild form of congenital cerebral palsy, a condition which motivated him to pursue a future in computing.^[4]

1 Hacker
2 Open source
3 Opinions on technology and political issues
4 Criticism and conflicts
5 Bibliography
6 References
7 See also
8 External links

[edit] Hacker

Born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1957, Raymond lived on three continents before settling in Pennsylvania in 1971.^[5] His involvement with hacker culture began in 1976 and he contributed to his first free software project in the late 1980s. His primary contributions to open source software has been maintaining the fetchmail email client, and gpsd. Other contributions have included Emacs editing modes and portions of libraries like GNU ncurses, giflib/libungif, and libpng. He has also written a number of How-to documents and FAQs, many of which are included in the Linux Documentation Project corpus.^[6]

Raymond initially became known by hackers for his adoption of the Jargon File. Raymond's 2003 book The Art of Unix Programming covers Unix history and culture, and modern user tools available for programming and accomplishing tasks in Unix.

[edit] Open source

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 quotation appears in The Cathedral and the Bazaar.^[7] In 1997, Raymond became a prominent voice in the open source movement and was a co-founder of the Open Source Initiative. He also took on the self-appointed role of ambassador of open source to the press, business and public. The release of the Mozilla (then Netscape) source code in 1998 was an early accomplishment. He has agreed to lecture at Microsoft,^[8] has accepted stock options from VA Software to provide credibility to the company and act as a hired "corporate conscience"^[9] and has spoken in more than fifteen countries on six continents.

Raymond has had a number of public disputes with other figures in the free software 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. In 1999, Raymond published an article entitled "Shut Up And Show Them The Code".^[10] The article criticized Stallman over tactics to promote free and open source software, implying he spent too much time proselytizing and not producing code.

Raymond addressed some of his critics from the software development community in his 1999 essay "Take My Job, Please!",^[11] stating that he was willing to "back to the hilt" anyone qualified and willing to take his job and present the case for open source to the world. In February 2005, Raymond stepped down as the president of the Open Source Initiative.

He joined the Freespire Leadership Team on September 27, 2006.

[edit] Opinions on technology and political issues

Raymond is a prolific writer of political and technical opinion pieces through his website and blog. Between the spring of 2002 and June 2006, Raymond used his web log to promote his views on politics, race and the Iraq war. Controversial opinions he has proffered include that African-Americans are responsible for a disproportionate percentage of crimes because they have lower IQs,

“

In the U.S., blacks are 12% of the population but commit 50% of violent crimes; can anyone honestly think this is unconnected to the fact that they average 15 points of IQ lower than the general population? That stupid people are more violent is a fact independent of skin color. ^[12]

”

He has also stated that the Western world should embark on an "imperialist" military campaign to "civilize" the Muslim world and eliminate what he claims is its tendency for jihad through "military defeat, Western occupation, and a forced restructuring of society" because of the risk of nuclear terrorism after the September 11 attacks; he acknowledged that some might call this plan "deliberate cultural genocide."^[13]

He has claimed that "pederasty has never been a marked or unusual behavior among homosexuals, and even advocates of outright pedophilia are not shunned in the homosexual-activist community."^[14]

He has also strong views on Wikipedia. Reportedly, he stated that "‘disaster’ is not too strong a word for it".^[15] He claims that the open source model does not work for an encyclopedia, that the Wikipedia article about him is "neither accurate, nor fair, nor balanced",^[16] and that the site is "infested with moonbats".^[15]

On the 21 February 2007, Raymond mailed a message to a number of Linux related websites along with a Fedora Linux development mailing list. In the message Raymond criticised the Fedora distribution, citing numerous perceived problems,^[17] leading to a flame war on the Fedora development mailing list.

[edit] Criticism and conflicts

Raymond has rejected what he describes as the "very seductive" moral and ethical rhetoric of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, asserting that this is "not because his principles are wrong, but because that kind of language ... simply does not persuade anybody."^[10] This stance has stoked political tensions in the community.^{[citation needed]}

Raymond contributed CML2, an alternative kernel configuration system, but it was not accepted by the Linux kernel developers. This rejection led to acrimony between Raymond and kernel developers,^[18] and Raymond has attributed the refusal to "kernel list politics".^[19]

His temper has 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. ^[20] Perens later dropped the issue.^[21]

Some hackers have become dissatisfied with changes in the character of the Jargon File since Raymond took over its maintenance. Some of this criticism accuses Raymond of unfairly changing the file's focus to the Unix hacker culture instead of the older hacker cultures where the concept of the Jargon File originated. Raymond has responded to this criticism by claiming that the nature of hacking had changed and the Jargon File should report on hacker culture and not attempt to enshrine it.^[22] More recently, Raymond has been accused of adding terms to the Jargon File that appear to have been used primarily by Raymond (e.g., "Aunt Tillie" and "GandhiCon") or that have been widely used in political communities Raymond participates, but rarely in hacker communities (e.g., "fisking" and "anti-idiotarian"). He has also been criticized for adding to the "Hacker Politics" section a claim that the average hacker's politics were shifting away from liberalism and towards neo-conservativism.^[23]

[edit] Bibliography

The New Hacker's Dictionary (editor) (MIT Press, paperback ISBN 0-262-68092-0, cloth ISBN 0-262-18178-9) — printed version of the Jargon file
The Cathedral and the Bazaar (O'Reilly; hardcover ISBN 1-56592-724-9, October 1999; paperback ISBN 0-596-00108-8, January 2001) — includes "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", "Homesteading the Noosphere", "The Magic Cauldron" and "Revenge of the Hackers"
The Art of Unix Programming (Addison-Wesley, October 2003; paperback ISBN 0-13-142901-9)