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

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. Image File history File linksMetadata Download high-resolution version (593x913, 63 KB) Eric S. Raymond, taken on 3-June-2005 at FISL 6. ... Image File history File linksMetadata Download high-resolution version (593x913, 63 KB) Eric S. Raymond, taken on 3-June-2005 at FISL 6. ... Fórum Internacional Software Livre (FISL) (International Free Software Forum) is a free software event that happens every year in Porto Alegre, the capital of Rio Grande Do Sul, the most southern state of Brazil. ... Nickname: Coordinates: Country Brazil Region South State Rio Grande do Sul Government  - Mayor José Fogaça (PPS) Area  - City 496. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... Eric Raymond is the lead villain in the 1980s cartoon television show Jem. ... In computing, a programmer is someone who does computer programming and develops computer software. ... The open source movement is an offshoot of the free software movement that advocates open source software as an alternative label for free software, primarily on pragmatic rather than philosophical grounds. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... The Jargon File is a glossary of hacker slang. ... The Cathedral and the Bazaar (abbreviated CatB) is an essay by Eric S. Raymond on software engineering methods, based on his observations of the Linux kernel development process and his experiences managing an open source project, fetchmail. ...

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 "Moo Do, an eclectic martial art based on Tae Kwon Do".^[1] He is an advocate of the Second Amendment right to bear arms^[2] and supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Raymond identifies himself religiously as a neopagan,^[3] is an initiate witch and coven leader.^[4] Anarcho-capitalism refers to an anti-statist philosophy that embraces capitalism as one of its foundational principles. ... The Libertarian Party is an American political party founded on Dec. ... Science fiction is a form of speculative fiction principally dealing with the impact of imagined science and technology, or both, upon society and persons as individuals. ... A firearm is a kinetic energy weapon that fires either a single or multiple projectiles propelled at high velocity by the gases produced by action of the rapid confined burning of a propellant. ... This does not adequately cite its references or sources. ... The Bill of Rights in the National Archives Amendment II (the Second Amendment) of the United States Constitution, which is part of the Bill of Rights, declares a well regulated militia as being necessary to the security of a free State, and prohibits Congress from infringement of the right of... The subject of this article is the 2003 invasion of Iraq. ... Neopaganism or Neo-Paganism is any of a heterogeneous group of new religious movements, particularly those influenced by ancient, primarily pre-Christian and sometimes pre-Judaic religions. ... For other uses, see Witchcraft (disambiguation). ... Coven or covan was originally a late medieval Scots word (c1500) meaning a gathering of any kind, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. ...

Raymond has a mild form of congenital cerebral palsy, a condition which motivated him to pursue a future in computing.^[5] This article or section is in need of attention from an expert on the subject. ...

Hacker

Born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1957, Raymond lived on three continents before settling in Pennsylvania in 1971.^[6] 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.^[7] Nickname: Location in Massachusetts, USA Coordinates: , Country United States State Massachusetts County Suffolk County Settled 1630 Incorporated (city) 1822 Government  - Governor Deval Patrick (D) Area  - City  89. ... Capital Harrisburg Largest city Philadelphia Area  Ranked 33rd  - Total 46,055 sq mi (119,283 km²)  - Width 280 miles (455 km)  - Length 160 miles (255 km)  - % water 2. ... Clockwise from top: The logo of the GNU Project (the GNU head), the Linux kernel mascot Tux the Penguin, and the FreeBSD daemon Free software is a term coined by Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation[1] to refer to software that can be used, studied, and modified without... Fetchmail is a utility found on some Unix-like systems used to retrieve e-mail from a remote POP3, IMAP, ETRN or ODMR mail server to the users local system. ... Gpsd is a daemon that receives data from GPS receiver, and provides the data back to multiple applications such as Kismet. ... Emacs is a class of text editors, possessing an extensive set of features, that are popular with computer programmers and other technically proficient computer users. ... Ncurses is a programming library providing an API, allowing the programmer to write text user interfaces in a terminal-independent manner. ... libpng is the official PNG reference library (originally called pnglib). ... A how-to is an informal, often short, description of how to accomplish some specific task. ... FAQ is an abbreviation for Frequently Asked Question(s). The term refers to listed questions and answers, all supposed to be frequently asked in some context, and pertaining to a particular topic. ... The Linux Documentation Project (TLDP) is an all-volunteer project that maintains a large collection of Linux (and Linux-related) documentation and publishes the collection online. ...

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. The Art of Unix Programming is a book written by Eric Raymond about the history and culture of Unix programming from its earliest days to the current work on Linux. ...

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, published in 1997.^[8] Raymond became a prominent voice in the open source movement and co-founded the Open Source Initiative in 1998. 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,^[9] has accepted stock options from VA Software to provide credibility to the company and act as a hired "corporate conscience"^[10] and has spoken in more than fifteen countries on six continents. This article does not cite any references or sources. ... A software bug is an error, flaw, mistake, failure, or fault in a computer program that prevents it from behaving as intended (e. ... Linus Benedict Torvalds  ; born December 28, 1969 in Helsinki, Finland) is a Finnish software engineer best known for initiating the development of the Linux kernel. ... Linus Law can refer to two notions, both named after Linus Torvalds. ... The Open Source Initiative is an organization dedicated to promoting open source software. ... Open source refers to projects that are open to the public and which draw on other projects that are freely available to the general public. ... Mozilla was the official, public, original name of Mozilla Application Suite by the Mozilla Foundation, nowadays called SeaMonkey suite. ... Netscape was a proprietary cross-platform Internet suite created by Netscape Communications Corporation and then in-house by AOL to continue the Netscape series after Netscape 6. ... Microsoft Corporation, (NASDAQ: MSFT, HKSE: 4338) is a multinational computer technology corporation with global annual revenue of US$44. ... Main article: Option A stock option is a specific type of option that uses the stock itself as an underlying instrument to determine the options pay-off (and therefore its value). ... LNUX stock price (09-Dec-1999 through 09-Dec-2000) VA Software Corporation (NASDAQ: LNUX), formerly VA Linux Systems, is the provider of the SourceForge Development Intelligence application. ...

Raymond has had a number of public disputes with other figures in the free software movement. He 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."^[11] In 1999, Raymond published an article entitled "Shut Up And Show Them The Code".^[11] The article criticized Stallman over tactics to promote free and open source software, implying that, instead of using ethical rhetoric in defense of free software, he should be demonstrating the quality of open-source code. Richard Matthew Stallman (often abbreviated as RMS) (born March 16, 1953) is a software freedom activist, hacker, and software developer. ... The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a non-profit corporation founded in October 1985 by Richard Stallman to support the free software movement (free as in freedom), and in particular the GNU project. ... Free and Open Source Software, also F/OSS or FOSS, is software which is liberally licensed to grant the right of users to study, change, and improve its design through the availability of its source code. ...

Raymond addressed some of his critics from the software development community in his 1999 essay "Take My Job, Please!",^[12] 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. The Open Source Initiative is an organization dedicated to promoting open source software. ...

He joined the Freespire Leadership Team on September 27, 2006. Freespire is a community-driven Linux distribution which is composed entirely of free/open source software, while providing users the choice of including proprietary software including multimedia codecs, device drivers and application software as they see fit. ... is the 270th day of the year (271st in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... For the Manfred Mann album, see 2006 (album). ...

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, The first use of the term weblog. ... For other uses, see Iraq war (disambiguation). ... An African American (also Afro-American, Black American, or simply black) is a member of an ethnic group in the United States whose ancestors, usually in predominant part, were indigenous to Africa. ... IQ redirects here; for other uses of that term, see IQ (disambiguation). ...

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."^[14] This article does not cite any references or sources. ... This article or section does not cite any references or sources. ... Nations with a Muslim majority appear in green, while nations that are approximately 50% Muslim appear yellow. ... Flag used by Muslims Army during early Islam Jihad, sometimes spelled Jahad, Jehad, Jihaad, (Arabic: IPA: ) as an Islamic term, is sometimes referred to as the sixth pillar of Islam, although it occupies no official status as such in Sunni Islam. ... Terrorist redirects here. ... The World Trade Center on fire The September 11, 2001 attacks were a series of coordinated terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001. ... Cultural genocide is a term used to describe the deliberate destruction of the cultural heritage of a people or nation for political or military reasons. ...

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."^[15]

He also has strong views concerning Wikipedia. Reportedly, he stated that "‘disaster’ is not too strong a word for it".^[16] 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",^[17] and that the site is "infested with moonbats".^[16] Wikipedia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia /**/ @import /skins-1. ... Moonbat (also barking moonbat and moonbat crazy) is a term often used currently in U. S. politics as a political epithet referring to extremists, most often of the political left. ...

On February 21, 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,^[18] leading to a flame war on the Fedora development mailing list. Fedora (previously called Fedora Core) is a yum and RPM-based GNU/Linux distribution, developed by the community-supported Fedora Project and sponsored by Red Hat. ... This article is about the Internet meaning of the word flaming. For other meanings, and meanings of the word flame, see Flame. ...

Criticism and conflicts

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,^[19] and Raymond has attributed the refusal to "kernel list politics".^[20] Configuration Menu Language is used, before compilation of a Linux kernel, to configure the set of values that will determine the composition and exact functionality of the kernel. ... The Linux kernel is a Unix-like operating system kernel. ...

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.^[21] Perens later dropped the issue.^[22] Bruce Perens is a prominent figure in the open source movement and to some extent in the free software movement. ... Debian is a project based around the development of a free, complete operating system through the collaboration of volunteers from around the world. ...

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.^[23] 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.^[24]. Robert Fisk The term Fisking, or to Fisk, is blogosphere slang describing ruthlessly detailed point-by-point criticism that highlights errors, disputes the analysis of presented facts, or highlights other problems in a statement, article, or essay. ... Liberalism is an ideology, philosophical view, and political tradition which holds that liberty is the primary political value. ... Neoconservatism is a political current and movement, mainly in the United States, which is generally held to have emerged in the 1960s, coalesced in the 1970s, and has had a significant presence in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. ...

Nikolai Bezroukov wrote "Open Source Software Development as a Special Type of Academic Research (Critique of Vulgar Raymondism)" ^[25]. Raymond was not impressed, writing "the parts of it that are not tendentious nonsense largely repeat observations that other people have made better and sooner"^[26]. This article does not cite any references or sources. ...

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)

The Jargon File is a glossary of hacker slang. ... The Cathedral and the Bazaar (abbreviated CatB) is an essay by Eric S. Raymond on software engineering methods, based on his observations of the Linux kernel development process and his experiences managing an open source project, fetchmail. ... Homesteading the Noosphere, an essay written by Eric S. Raymond about the social workings of Open Source software development, follows up on his influential The Cathedral and the Bazaar. The essay concerns issues of project ownership and transfer, as well as investigating possible anthropological roots of the gift culture in... The Art of Unix Programming is a book written by Eric Raymond about the history and culture of Unix programming from its earliest days to the current work on Linux. ...

References

September 14 is the 257th day of the year (258th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2005 (MMV) was a common year starting on Saturday (link displays full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2007 (MMVII) is the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the AD/CE era. ... March 14 is the 73rd day of the year (74th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2007 (MMVII) is the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the AD/CE era. ... February 25 is the 56th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2007 (MMVII) is the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the AD/CE era. ... February 25 is the 56th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2007 (MMVII) is the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the AD/CE era. ... is the 53rd day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2007 (MMVII) is the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the AD/CE era. ... is the 26th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2007 (MMVII) is the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the AD/CE era. ... is the 25th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2007 (MMVII) is the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the AD/CE era. ... is the 176th day of the year (177th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2007 (MMVII) is the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the AD/CE era. ... is the 176th day of the year (177th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ...

See also

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Eric S. Raymond

• Everybody Loves Eric Raymond
• Halloween Documents
• Revolution OS
• User Friendly

Image File history File links This is a lossless scalable vector image. ... Wikiquote is a sister project of Wikipedia, using the same MediaWiki software. ... Everybody Loves Eric Raymond (ELER) is a webcomic created by John Leach and is co-written with Louisa Parry with help from friends and random strangers. ... The Halloween documents are a series of confidential memoranda on potential strategies employed by Microsoft relating to open-source software and to Linux in particular; and a series of responses to these memoranda. ... Promotional poster for two disc edition of Revolution OS Revolution OS is a documentary which traces the history of GNU, Linux, Free Software and the Open Source movement. ... For the concept in software engineering, see user-friendliness. ...

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Eric S. Raymond

• Eric Raymond's home page and weblog
• Works by Eric S. Raymond at Project Gutenberg
• Eric S. Raymond at the Internet Movie Database
• Attempt to hire Eric E-mail from Microsoft, with Eric's response
• The User Friendly webcomic issue with Eric S. Raymond.
• Linux Link Tech Show interview (audio), 2005