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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 "Jargon File" (better 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) of 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 rights and belligerent support for the 2003 Iraq War has nettled some hackers, but he seems to enjoy the controversy this engenders.
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 job of being the ambassador of open source to the press, business and the mainstream culture. He is a gifted speaker with the moves (and 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 argument 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 often worked to undermine other leader/speakers of the movement. His forthright rejection of the moral and ethical arguments of RMS and the Free Software Foundation in favor of more a 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 himself, largely due to Raymond's refusal to play long with the rules and conventions
of Linux kernel development, and his expectance of having his patch be
accepted based on who he was, rather than technical merit.
He has also, on several occasions, been accused of directly selling out. For instance, he agreed to lecture at Microsoft, allowing them to better counter open source software, 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." He has also been accused of using his position in order to further other political goals.
He is further critisized for writing about open source/free software development, without much knowledge or experience in how it works. His greatest code contribution was in a revision of popclient into fetchmail, a project that would take a competent programmer maybe a few weeks. Until recently, the fetchmail page did not credit popclient. His other contributions are minimal. At the same time, especially outside of the Linux/GNU/open source/free software developer community, he has made himself well-known as the spokesperson of the community, and of documenting the free software/open source development process. In practice, never having had experience with the process himself, his documents, while very eloquent and compelling, are considered quite naive and incorrect by many within the developer community.
Furthermore, his temper has also caused some tension between Raymond and other Open Source advocates, most famously with Bruce Perens. Perens made public a private email threat he received from Raymond on the Debian mailing lists, citing safety concerns. [1]
Mr. Raymond addresses some of these assertions in his essay Take My Job, Please!, 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," although he does not meet all of his listed qualifications himself (further responses: [1] [1] [1])
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