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Comment by chx | Hacker News Reader

> Every time you use a Web browser, locate yourself on Google Maps, draw money from an ATM, or play on a game console, you rely on computer code I wrote and gave away.

I am puzzled. What does he refer to? http://thyrsus.com/gitweb/ there's nothing here that resembles a network stack, the Wikipedia page doesn't mention anything. https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/CREDITS mentions him as the ncurses co-maintainer and terminfo master file maintainer. What am I ignorant of here?

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It's a bit too absolute of a statement IMO, but some of the comments here elaborate on his work in Android and iOS: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3554 The GIF and PNG stuff would apply to "using a Web browser" or "play on a game console" in general.

Here he says gpsd is used in Android: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4886 . Anyway, that could be "locate yourself" in general.

Don't really have any ideas about ATMs. Maybe using gpsd for time from GPS? He's talked about that on his blog. I don't know why ATMs wouldn't use NTP as they're probably already fairly well-networked, though.

If I were going to say this, I'd cite carefully to avoid looking boastful. To each his own. It does seem fairly well-supported if you do some research. Here's his list of projects he's touched: http://www.catb.org/esr/software.html

Without making any sort of judgement on his claim (in any direction), I think he is referring to gpsd:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gpsd

http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gpsd.git

Eric's ego is apparently way ahead of his actual self-promotion skills. If he's so important to everything, why hasn't he been on staff at red hat or the linux foundation or google or some such for the last, oh, 15+ years?

Also, most of the functionality behind all of the services he names is implemented by people doing regular jobs at technology companies.

    "The Internet was built by people like me." - Eric S. Raymond

I guess that's kind of like if Tim Berners-Lee said:

    "I built the internet."

Maybe this author can fit some Eric S. Raymond's content into his blog post:

http://james-iry.blogspot.com.au/2009/05/brief-incomplete-an...

If Eric S. Raymond doesn't spend wastefully, he should still have tens of millions:

http://www.zdnet.com/article/eric-raymond-how-ill-spend-my-m...

He's a great software engineer, but I didn't like the tone of this campaign for monthly donations either.

I was going to ask what happened to his VA Linux money, but then again, it was stock valuation. How much did he cash out before the 2000 bust?

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