If you ask me who's the proudest hacker in the world, I would say that it's Eric S. Raymond. ESR, as he is often called, is a computer programmer and open source software evangelist. He is also a well-known author and has been very influential in giving the term 'hacker' a positive image.Eric S. Raymond is our "Geek of the Month" for May. In honor of this über geek, we have collected some interesting facts about him including a brief summary of his fabled life.
Eric S. Raymond was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1957. He lived on three continents before settling in Pennsylvania in 1971. Raymond says his mild form of congenital cerebral palsy motivated him to pursue a future in computing; 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 have been maintaining the fetchmail email client for a certain time, and gpsd. Other contributions have included Emacs editing modes and portions of libraries like GNU ncurses, giflib/libungif, and libpng. He also wrote CML2, a source code configuration system; while originally intended for the Linux kernel, kernel developers rejected it. Raymond attributed this rejection to "kernel list politics".Hackers initially knew Raymond for his adoption of the Jargon File. Some of the changes made under his watch have been controversial; early critics accused Raymond of unfairly changing the file's focus to the Unix hacker culture instead of the older hacker cultures where the Jargon File originated. Raymond has responded by saying that the nature of hacking had changed and the Jargon File should report on hacker culture, and not attempt to enshrine it.
Raymond is the author of a number of How-to documents and FAQs, many of which are included in the Linux Documentation Project corpus. 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.
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. 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 accepted stock options from VA Software to provide credibility to the company and act as a hired "corporate conscience" and has spoken in more than fifteen countries on six continents including a lecture at Microsoft.
In his open source advocacy, Raymond refused to speculate on whether the "bazaar" development model could be applied to works such as books and music, not wanting to "weaken the winning argument for open-sourcing software by tying it to a potential loser". Later, he said that it could not work for an encyclopedia; he was particularly critical of Wikipedia, calling it a "disaster", and raising concerns about the factual accuracy and neutrality of its article about him.
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."
Raymond addressed some of his critics from the software development community in his 1999 essay "Take My Job, Please!", 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.
Raymond was granted 150,000 share options of VA Linux that reached a value of $32 million on the day of VA's IPO. His shares vested over a four-year period contingent on him staying on the board. Twelve months later, following the Internet bubble burst, shares of VA had dropped from a high of $242.87 to $14.
Interests and politics
Other than his computing interests, Raymond is known to have strong interests in science fiction and firearms and has a black belt in "Moo Do, an eclectic martial art based on Tae Kwon Do". He is an advocate of a general right to possess and use firearms. Raymond identifies himself religiously as a neopagan, and is an initiate witch and coven leader.
Raymond is a prolific writer of political and technical opinion pieces through his website and blog. Raymond is an avowed anarcho-capitalist and a supporter of the Libertarian Party. However, he supported the War on Iraq, and criticized the Libertarian party for perceived isolationism in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks; he said that the Western world should embark on an "imperialist" military campaign to "civilize" the Muslim world. He acknowledged that some might call this plan "deliberate cultural genocide." He has also written about controversial subjects such as race and IQ, and alleged pederasty and pedophilia among homosexuals.
Famous Quotations by Eric S. Raymond:
"A critical factor in its success was that the X developers were willing to give the sources away for free in accordance with the hacker ethic, and able to distribute them over the Internet."
"Berkeley hackers liked to see themselves as rebels against soulless corporate empires."
"For the first time, individual hackers could afford to have home machines comparable in power and storage capacity to the minicomputers of ten years earlier - Unix engines capable of supporting a full development environment and talking to the Internet."
"If Unix could present the same face, the same capabilities, on machines of many different types, it could serve as a common software environment for all of them."
"In early 1993, a hostile observer might have had grounds for thinking that the Unix story was almost played out, and with it the fortunes of the hacker tribe."
"In the beginning, there were Real Programmers."
"Linux evolved in a completely different way. From nearly the beginning, it was rather casually hacked on by huge numbers of volunteers coordinating only through the Internet."
"The ARPAnet was the first transcontinental, high-speed computer network."
"The beginnings of the hacker culture, as we know it today can be conveniently dated to 1961, the year MIT acquired the first PDP-1."
"The workstation-class machines built by Sun and others opened up new worlds for hackers."
"Traditionally, operating systems had been written in tight assembler to extract the absolute highest efficiency possible out of their host machines."
"Worse, by the early 1990s it was becoming clear that ten years of effort to commercialize proprietary Unix was ending in failure."
Learn more about ESR by visiting his personal website at www.catb.org/~esr/
Special thanks to www.wikipedia.org
