ESR’s reputation has changed radically in the last ten years. When this article was written he was considered a leader of the open source movement, instrumental in the success story of Netscape licensing their browser; developer of the fairly popular fetchmail; and keeper of early unix/MIT culture in the Jargon File. Now he’s mostly notorious for his blog writings.
ESR really went off the rails in 2001. After that he had a large cult following of other anarcho-libertarians, but most prominent hackers stopped taking him seriously. The author advocating for the “anti-idiotarian manifesto” was enough for me to feel a bit dismissive. The addition of amazon links using the author’s referral code didn’t win any favors either. At the very least he could have mentioned the link uses a referral. I do think Fog Creek is a great company and I enjoy many of Joels other blog posts, I just feel a bit disappointed with this one.
I disagree that Linux programmers don’t like GUI’s, this was false even in 2003. The author claims that nix culture values things more highly when they are more useful to programmers, and I disagree with this as well. nix culture values transparency, and inter-operability. Even non-programmers can look and see what is happening on their own computers because everything is a text file that is easily read and accessible. This has one distinct disadvantage to binary files, namely with speed since binaries are faster, and possibly easier to secure. (this is one reason why journald exists, https://www.loggly.com/blog/why-journald/)
The Jargon file was started in 1975, and built for 15 years before ESR started adding to it and maintaining it. His additions are very male centric and libertarian centric and have a lot of problems, even the original authors have problems with his additions.
ESR’s biggest contributions were “The Cathedral And The Bazaar” which codified what was happening in FOSS at the time it was written and helped to popularize open licenses, and his co-founding of the Open Source Initiative, and self appointed open source ambassadorship.
ESR does have quite a bit of technical knowledge, but he was never considered a great programmer and I don’t know of any software that he wrote from scratch. He contributed to Emac’s codebase, but left after making unauthorized code additions. Fetchmail was built off code written by Carl Harris, had numerous security issues that were never fixed, and development on it was stopped in 2004 when ESR put it into “maintenance mode” when it was then taken over by other people. http://www.fetchmail.info/design-notes.html
I have personally never been able to ignore ESR’s misogyny or his false view that open source is a true meritocracy, even in the 90s, though many other people did not have a problem with it back then. This probably colors my opinion more than a little and even today many people may be able to just shrug this off as a product of the times, but having lived through them, I can’t feel the same way.
Ah, ESR. He really did go off the rails after the heady days of the early “open source” period in the mid to late 90s. Or perhaps he just revealed more of his true self and restrained himself less? Either way, very few take him seriously these days and his blog posts have become more and more extreme.
Don’t get me started about the abomination that is fetchmail… FWIW, I think he wrote reposurgeon from scratch, but in general his coding skills are not highly regarded by most (he seems to think otherwise - just read his blog). He’s working on NTPSec, but it’s currently still in a pre-release state - would be curious to see a review of the codebase once it’s released.
While I’m on an ESR rant (it’s good to have one at least every few months, I find), PHK wrote a response to CATB in 2012, which ESR responded to.
This article totally lost me with all the Eric S. Raymond worship.
ESR’s reputation has changed radically in the last ten years. When this article was written he was considered a leader of the open source movement, instrumental in the success story of Netscape licensing their browser; developer of the fairly popular fetchmail; and keeper of early unix/MIT culture in the Jargon File. Now he’s mostly notorious for his blog writings.
ESR really went off the rails in 2001. After that he had a large cult following of other anarcho-libertarians, but most prominent hackers stopped taking him seriously. The author advocating for the “anti-idiotarian manifesto” was enough for me to feel a bit dismissive. The addition of amazon links using the author’s referral code didn’t win any favors either. At the very least he could have mentioned the link uses a referral. I do think Fog Creek is a great company and I enjoy many of Joels other blog posts, I just feel a bit disappointed with this one.
I disagree that Linux programmers don’t like GUI’s, this was false even in 2003. The author claims that nix culture values things more highly when they are more useful to programmers, and I disagree with this as well. nix culture values transparency, and inter-operability. Even non-programmers can look and see what is happening on their own computers because everything is a text file that is easily read and accessible. This has one distinct disadvantage to binary files, namely with speed since binaries are faster, and possibly easier to secure. (this is one reason why journald exists, https://www.loggly.com/blog/why-journald/)
The Jargon file was started in 1975, and built for 15 years before ESR started adding to it and maintaining it. His additions are very male centric and libertarian centric and have a lot of problems, even the original authors have problems with his additions.
ESR’s biggest contributions were “The Cathedral And The Bazaar” which codified what was happening in FOSS at the time it was written and helped to popularize open licenses, and his co-founding of the Open Source Initiative, and self appointed open source ambassadorship.
ESR does have quite a bit of technical knowledge, but he was never considered a great programmer and I don’t know of any software that he wrote from scratch. He contributed to Emac’s codebase, but left after making unauthorized code additions. Fetchmail was built off code written by Carl Harris, had numerous security issues that were never fixed, and development on it was stopped in 2004 when ESR put it into “maintenance mode” when it was then taken over by other people. http://www.fetchmail.info/design-notes.html
I have personally never been able to ignore ESR’s misogyny or his false view that open source is a true meritocracy, even in the 90s, though many other people did not have a problem with it back then. This probably colors my opinion more than a little and even today many people may be able to just shrug this off as a product of the times, but having lived through them, I can’t feel the same way.
Ah, ESR. He really did go off the rails after the heady days of the early “open source” period in the mid to late 90s. Or perhaps he just revealed more of his true self and restrained himself less? Either way, very few take him seriously these days and his blog posts have become more and more extreme.
Don’t get me started about the abomination that is fetchmail… FWIW, I think he wrote reposurgeon from scratch, but in general his coding skills are not highly regarded by most (he seems to think otherwise - just read his blog). He’s working on NTPSec, but it’s currently still in a pre-release state - would be curious to see a review of the codebase once it’s released.
While I’m on an ESR rant (it’s good to have one at least every few months, I find), PHK wrote a response to CATB in 2012, which ESR responded to.