Eric S. Raymond

"Eric Raymond" redirects here. For other uses, see Eric Raymond (disambiguation).

Eric S. Raymond
Raymond at Linucon 2004
Born	December 4, 1957 (1957-12-04) Boston, Massachusetts
Residence	Pennsylvania
Nationality	American
Other names	ESR
Alma mater	University of Pennsylvania
Occupation	Software developer, author
Website
http://www.catb.org/~esr/

Eric Steven Raymond (born December 4, 1957), often referred to as ESR, is an American computer programmer, author and open source software advocate. After the 1997 publication of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Raymond was for a number of years frequently quoted as an unofficial spokesman for the open source movement. He is also known for his 1990 edit and later updates of the Jargon File, currently in print as the The New Hacker's Dictionary.

Biography

Born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1957, Raymond lived in Venezuela as a child. His family moved back to Pennsylvania in 1971. Raymond said in an interview that his cerebral palsy motivated him to go into computing. Raymond has spoken in more than fifteen countries on six continents, including a lecture at Microsoft.

He wrote CML2, a source code configuration system; while originally intended for the Linux kernel, it was rejected by kernel developers. Raymond attributed this rejection to "kernel list politics". Linus Torvalds on the other hand said in a 2007 mailing list post that as a matter of policy, the development team preferred more incremental changes.

In 2000-2002 Raymond wrote a number of HOWTOs still included in the Linux Documentation Project. His personal archive also lists a number of non-technical and very early non-Linux FAQs. His books, The Cathedral and the Bazaar and The Art of Unix Programming, discuss Unix and Linux history and culture, and user tools for programming and other tasks. In 1998 he received and published a Microsoft document expressing worry about the quality of rival open-source software. This, along with other documents subsequently leaked, became known as the Halloween Documents. Noting that the Jargon File had not been maintained since about 1983, he adopted it in 1990 and currently has a third edition in print. One purist, Paul Dourish, maintains an archived original version of the Jargon File, because, he says, Raymond's updates "essentially destroyed what held it together."

Raymond is currently the admin of the project page for gpsd, a daemon that makes GPS data from a receiver available in JSON format. Also, some versions of NetHack include his guide. He also contributes code and content to The Battle for Wesnoth.

Founded in June 2009 with Raymond's help, the hacktivist website NedaNet intended to influence the domestic opposition to the Iranian government in the event of the 2009 Iranian election protests. Named in honor of Neda Soltan, a young woman killed in unrest after the Iranian elections, it planned to offer help with proxy servers and anonymizers. Raymond volunteered to be the website's public contact, and in this capacity received on-line threats,^{[citation needed]} including one death threat reported to the FBI, which he claimed the agency "is taking seriously".^{[citation needed]} He has since ceased to participate in this movement, saying that he had started to doubt if his contacts really were connected to activists on the ground.^{[citation needed]}

Open source

Raymond began his programming career with writing proprietary software, between 1980 and 1985. In a 2008 essay he "defended the right of programmers to issue work under proprietary licenses because I think that if a programmer wants to write a program and sell it, it’s neither my business nor anyone else’s but his customer’s what the terms of sale are." In the same essay he also said that the "logic of the system" puts developers into "dysfunctional roles", with bad code the result.

Raymond also coined an aphorism he dubbed "Linus' Law", inspired by Linus Torvalds: "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow", that first appeared in The Cathedral and the Bazaar.

Raymond became a prominent voice in the open source movement and co-founded the Open Source Initiative in 1998, taking on the self-appointed role of ambassador of open source to the press, business and public. The internal white paper by Frank Hecker that led to the release of the Mozilla (then Netscape) source code in 1998 cited The Cathedral and the Bazaar as "independent validation" of ideas proposed by Eric Hahn and Jamie Zawinski. Hahn also described the book as "clearly influential." Raymond has 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".

Raymond has had a number of public disputes with other figures in the free software movement. As head of the Open Source Initiative, he argued that advocates should focus on the potential for better products. The "very seductive" moral and ethical rhetoric of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation fails, he said, "not because his principles are wrong, but because that kind of language ... simply does not persuade anybody." Raymond stepped down as the president of the Open Source Initiative in February 2005.

Bibliography

• Hamerly, Jim, Paquin, Tom and Walton, Susan; Freeing the Source: The Story of Mozilla, in Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution, O'Reilly, 1999. 280pp, ISBN 1-56592-582-3
• Moody, Glyn; Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution, Basic Books 2002, 342pp, ISBN 978-0738203331
• Suarez-Potts, Louis; Interview: Frank Hecker, Community Articles, May 1 2001, www.openoffice.org, OpenOffice website

By Eric Raymond

Books by Raymond

• 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 with Raymond listed as the editor.
• 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)

Writings by Raymond posted or archived on his website

• How to Ask Questions the Smart Way, mirrored on personal site
• Release Early, Release Often, excerpt from The Cathedral and the Bazaar, mirrored on personal site

• Eric Raymond's FAQ collection, mirrored on his personal site. Includes links to Linux Documentation Project:
  • The Unix Hardware Buyer HOWTO, Linux Documentation Project. Last update April 2010. (retrieved 11/4/2011)
  • The Linux XFree86 HOWTO, Linux Documentation Project. Last update September 2001. (retrieved 11/4/2011)
  • The Unix and Internet Fundamentals HOWTO, Linux Documentation Project. Last update January 2010. (retrieved 11/4/2011)
  • Software Release Practice HOWTO, Linux Documentation Project. Last update April 2010. (retrieved 11/4/2011)
  • The Linux Mail User HOWTO, Linux Documentation Project. Dated 2005. (retrieved 11/4/2011)
  • DocBook Demystification HOWTO, Linux Documentation Project. Last update September 2010. (retrieved 11/4/2011)
  • UPS HOWTO, with Nick Christenson, Linux Documentation Project. Last update May 2007. (retrieved 11/4/2011)
  • The Linux Reading List HOWTO, Linux Documentation Project. Last update February 2004. (retrieved 11/4/2011)
  • Fedora Multimedia Installation HOWTO, Linux Documentation Project. Last update March 2006. (retrieved 11/4/2011)

See also

• Microsoft Halloween documents leak
• Revolution OS (film)
• Hacker ethic
• Release early, release often

External links

• Eric Raymond's home page and weblog
  • Raymond's Reviews of science fiction, published 1990-1992
• Works by Eric S. Raymond at Project Gutenberg
• Eric S. Raymond at the Internet Movie Database
• Linux Link Tech Show interview (audio), 2005
• "The Curse of the Gifted", from email exchange with Linus Torvalds, 2000