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Comment by tsm | Hacker News Reader

When I was getting into Linux as a teenager in 2008 esr came up a lot, but apart from writing The Cathedral and the Bazaar and a few shorter essays and contributing to relatively-minor opens source projects…what has he actually done? Especially recently? He frequently feels like someone who's famous because he's famous.

I'm not trying to slander the guy; he's definitely contributed more code and ideas to the open source community than I have. I just don't consider him to be anywhere near the same level of hacker as Linus or rms.

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His "The Art of Unix Programming" book is also pretty good; it's free on the internet[1]

But yes, you assessment seems about accurate. You don't even need to compare him to RMS or Linux; there are many many people who are doing the kind of things ESR is doing, but are just bragging about it less. ESR seems to have a bit of a misplaced arrogance problem.

His "how to become a hacker" essay from 2007[2] is probably a good example of it; it's pompous beyond belief and if it had a different author I would have believed it to be satire.

His Patreon page[3] is another good example.

[1] http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ or https://arp242.net/the-art-of-unix-programming/

[2]: http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

[3]: https://www.patreon.com/esr

I'd say I'm a fan and I'd agree he's not a hacker in Linus or rms class. His utility is explaining hackers, their actions , and the reasons for those actions to non hackers in a way that everybody doesn't disagree with too badly.

I couldn't articulate why I wanted to release software under an Open license to my boss, but ESR's writing helped them understand as far as they were able.

He certainly believes he's the most famous programmer in the world.

At least Terry Davis could write code.

https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/archive/show-them-the-code

https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/archive/moral-compassed

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13147038

tptacek on Dec 10, 2016 [-]

I think we're all pretty sure ESR is not in fact a god, and that nothing could have occurred with ESR or his magic flute to have demonstrated to him that he was. Rather, the story is more broadly illustrative of a pretty extreme narcissism and --- challenging --- variant of self-awareness. For a more down to earth example, consider how many of us would non-ironically write the following passage:

I’m wondering about this because my wife Cathy asked me a simple question last night, and I realized I didn’t have an answer to it. “Are you” she asked “the most famous programmer in the world?”

This was a question which I had, believe it or not, never thought about before. But it’s a reasonable one to ask, given recent evidence – notably, the unexpected success of my Patreon page. This is relevant because Patreon is mainly an arts-funding site – it’s clearly not designed for or by techies.

It goes on in this vein. Here, by the way, is a link to his Patreon page:

[link redacted]

Apparently we value "the code that makes our digital world work" a bit less than we value the person who fries our french fries at McDonalds. If that sounds mean, well, it is, but it was also Eric Raymond who put forward the idea that his Patreon page may indicate that he's among the most famous programmers in the world.

For a nerdier take on ESR's merits, hunt down Terry Lambert's take on fetchmail. (You should know who Terry Lambert is, if you don't already).

[link provided to "A tangential diatribe on the unsuitability of fetchmail"]

https://markmail.org/thread/pmoqk6tuybncu2is

armitron on Dec 10, 2016 [-]

Not to mention that ESR was, at some point, a multi-millionaire. Pretty sure he still is, in which case that Patreon page of his would be nothing but a con.

> He certainly believes he's the most famous programmer in the world.

This raises an interesting question: who actually is the most famous programmer?

(Obviously it's a fuzzy standard, but I'd broadly want to say "famous largely for coding work". I don't think Brin or Page were household names until they were in executive roles. Whether Zuckerberg counts, or rather when his fame stopped counting, is tricky. Snowden, Assange, Swartz, etc. I'd discount for the same reason.)

Offhand, the same-generation names that I think beat esr are Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, and maybe Knuth. The overall winner might be Sir Berners-Lee, who regularly gets mainstream press coverage - unless we're including Turing.

He's not that famous outside of hard core geek circles, but I am a huge fan of James Clark (not the SGI guy, but he's awesome too for different reasons), who wrote the Expat XML parser, Relax/NG XML schema language, and many other widely used standards and bodies of code that drive the Internet.

http://www.jclark.com/

http://www.jclark.com/bio.htm

He has such clarity of thought and mastery of diverse languages (some of which he invented and implemented). He saw exactly what was wrong with XML Schemas, and addressed it practically and elegantly with TREX, which he and others refined through humble constructive collaboration into Relax/NG. And he's a big proponent and creator (not just a talker like ESR) of free open source software.

https://relaxng.org/jclark/

Here's a fascinating insightful DDJ interview of James Clark, "A Triumph of Simplicity: James Clark on Markup Languages and XML":

http://www.drdobbs.com/a-triumph-of-simplicity-james-clark-o...

>A Triumph of Simplicity: James Clark on Markup Languages and XML

>If you peek under the hood of high-profile open-source projects such as Mozilla, Apache, Perl, and Python, you'll find a little program called "expat" handling the XML parsing. If you've ever used the man command on your GNU/Linux distribution, then you've also used groff, the GNU version of the UNIX text formatting application, troff. If you've ever done any work with SGML, from generating documentation from DocBook to building your own SGML applications, you've undoubtedly come across sgmls, SP, and Jade.

>Whether you've heard of him or not (and mostly likely, you haven't), James Clark (below right) has made your life easier. In addition to authoring these and other widely used open-source tools (see http://www.jclark.com/ for a complete list), Clark served as the technical lead of the original W3C XML Working Group and as the editor of the XSLT and XPath recommendations. He recently founded Thai Open Source Software Center (http://www.thaiopensource.com/). His latest project is TREX, an XML schema language. Clark sat down with Eugene Eric Kim to discuss markup languages, the standardization process, and the importance of simplicity.

[...]

>DDJ: You're well known for writing very good reference implementations for SGML and XML Standards. How important is it for these reference implementations to be good implementations as opposed to just something that works?

>JC: Having a reference implementation that's too good can actually be a negative in some ways.

>DDJ: Why is that?

>JC: Well, because it discourages other people from implementing it. If you've got a standard, and you have only one real implementation, then you might as well not have bothered having a standard. You could have just defined the language by its implementation. The point of standards is that you can have multiple implementations, and they can all interoperate.

>You want to make the standard sufficiently easy to implement so that it's not so much work to do an implementation that people are discouraged by the presence of a good reference implementation from doing their own implementation.

>DDJ: Is that necessarily a bad thing? If you have a single implementation that's good enough so that other people don't feel like they have to write another implementation, don't you achieve what you want with a standard in that all implementations — in this case, there's only one of them — work the same?

>JC: For any standard that's really useful, there are different kinds of usage scenarios and different classes of users, and you can't have one implementation that fits all. Take SGML, for example. Sometimes you want a really heavy-weight implementation that does validation and provides lots of information about a document. Sometimes you'd like a much lighter weight implementation that just runs as fast as possible, doesn't validate, and doesn't provide much information about a document apart from elements and attributes and data. But because it's so much work to write an SGML parser, you end up having one SGML parser that supports everything needed for a huge variety of applications, which makes it a lot more complicated. It would be much nicer if you had one SGML parser that is perfect for this application, and another SGML parser that is perfect for this other application. To make that possible, the standard has to be sufficiently simple that it makes sense to have multiple implementations.

> The Cathedral and the Bazaar and a few shorter essays

I think The New Hacker's Dictionary (aka The Jargon File) is the missing piece here. It's had an enormous cultural impact in a few different ways, and gave esr a voice and reputation among people who've never engaged with any of his other work.

First, it documented and popularized hacker culture to the point of being suggested as a gift by the NYT. Second, it became a formal source for everyone from the OED to NatGeo, which gave it a lot of indirect influence. Third, it actually helped shape a generation of coders; much like Neuromancer with cyberspace, the Portrait of J. Random Hacker was a partially self-fulfilling vision that motivated people to go out and emulate it.

It's obviously important to note that esr didn't write the Jargon File, or even create the first edited or printed version. But his 1991 version was the most popular, and the first to emphasize the ultimately more influential Unix culture over PDP-10. The people who document and popularize a culture pretty commonly become more notable than those most deeply involved in it, and I think esr is no exception.

And then there's Linus's Law, which he made up, then tried to blame on Linus.

"Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." -Eric S Raymond

"My favorite part of the "many eyes" argument is how few bugs were found by the two eyes of Eric (the originator of the statement). All the many eyes are apparently attached to a lot of hands that type lots of words about many eyes, and never actually audit code." -Theo De Raadt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus%27s_Law

>In Facts and Fallacies about Software Engineering, Robert Glass refers to the law as a "mantra" of the open source movement, but calls it a fallacy due to the lack of supporting evidence and because research has indicated that the rate at which additional bugs are uncovered does not scale linearly with the number of reviewers; rather, there is a small maximum number of useful reviewers, between two and four, and additional reviewers above this number uncover bugs at a much lower rate.[4] While closed-source practitioners also promote stringent, independent code analysis during a software project's development, they focus on in-depth review by a few and not primarily the number of "eyeballs".[5][6]

>Although detection of even deliberately inserted flaws[7][8] can be attributed to Raymond's claim, the persistence of the Heartbleed security bug in a critical piece of code for two years has been considered as a refutation of Raymond's dictum.[9][10][11][12] Larry Seltzer suspects that the availability of source code may cause some developers and researchers to perform less extensive tests than they would with closed source software, making it easier for bugs to remain.[12] In 2015, the Linux Foundation's executive director Jim Zemlin argued that the complexity of modern software has increased to such levels that specific resource allocation is desirable to improve its security. Regarding some of 2014's largest global open source software vulnerabilities, he says, "In these cases, the eyeballs weren't really looking".[11] Large scale experiments or peer-reviewed surveys to test how well the mantra holds in practice have not been performed.

The little experience Raymond DOES have auditing code has been a total fiasco and embarrassing failure, since his understanding of the code was incompetent and deeply tainted by his preconceived political ideology and conspiracy theories about global warming, which was his only motivation for auditing the code in the first place. His sole quest was to discredit the scientists who warned about global warming. The code he found and highlighted was actually COMMENTED OUT, and he never addressed the fact that the scientists were vindicated.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond

>During the Climategate fiasco, Raymond's ability to read other peoples' source code (or at least his honesty about it) was called into question when he was caught quote-mining analysis software written by the CRU researchers, presenting a commented-out section of source code used for analyzing counterfactuals as evidence of deliberate data manipulation. When confronted with the fact that scientists as a general rule are scrupulously honest, Raymond claimed it was a case of an "error cascade," a concept that makes sense in computer science and other places where all data goes through a single potential failure point, but in areas where outside data and multiple lines of evidence are used for verification, doesn't entirely make sense. (He was curiously silent when all the researchers involved were exonerated of scientific misconduct.)

Many say that if ESR had not written Cathedral and the Bazaar in 1997, then Netscape Corporation probably would not have decided to make their browser open source. The Mozilla Organization was created (by AOL, which bought Netscape) to shepherd the development of this code base. Firefox is a descendant of this code base. (Firefox started outside Mozilla as a fork of the code base, which IIRC was called the Mozilla browser at the time. After a few years, Mozilla renamed the fork they were working on to SeaMonkey and endorsed and embraced Firefox.)

ESR is the main instigator of the "rebranding" of "free software" as "open-source software":

>The free-software movement was launched in 1983. In 1998, a group of individuals advocated that the term free software should be replaced by open-source software (OSS) as an expression which is less ambiguous and more comfortable for the corporate world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software#End_of_19...

This rebranding was very influential.

For example, it probably caused Sun Microsystems in July 2000 to open source OpenOffice (the direct ancestor to LibreOffice).

Linus starting using the term "open source" shortly after the rebranding. Interest in Linux by IT departments worldwide exploded. Large annual conferences devoted to Linux appeared. Seeing a way to decrease the hold exerted by Microsoft on its customers, IBM in 2001 launched a multi-million-dollar ad campaign dubbed “Peace, Love, Linux”:

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2001/07/peace-love-and-...

In summary, ESR said in 1997 and 1998 that free software would become much more popular with organizations if it were explained differently, then put a lot of work into explaining it differently (e.g., founding a non-profit, the Open Source Initiative, writing many documents, including the most influential responses to Microsoft's attacks on free software), then over the next 3 years interest by organizations in free software exploded.

With the possible exception of Richard Stallman, ESR has clearly been the most influential explainer of free software to non-programmers.

>With the possible exception of Richard Stallman, ESR has clearly been the most influential explainer of free software to non-programmers.

That's funny, since ESR has made his career ATTACKING "free software" and trying to destroy everything RMS has done, not explain it.

I would say that Michael Teimann (founder of Cygnus Solutions in 1989, VP of Open Source Affairs at Red Hat) deserves credit as one of the most influential, constructive, and successful explainers (and developers, and leaders, and entrepreneurs) of free software and open source.

And Michael Teimann, unlike Eric Raymond, has actually written a WHOLE LOT of excellent, practical, widely used code himself. (Like the Gnu C++ compiler and debugger.) And he was explaining free software in 1989, years before Raymond ever started, by successfully explaining and selling millions of dollars worth of his free software company Cygnus's services to Sun, Sony, and many other clients. "We make free software affordable." And he's not bat shit crazy or racist, either.

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

>Michael Tiemann is vice president of open source affairs at Red Hat, Inc., and former President of the Open Source Initiative. He was the chief technical officer of Red Hat. He served on a number of boards, including the Embedded Linux Consortium, the GNOME Foundation advisory board, and the board of directors of ActiveState Tool Corp. He is also co-owner with Amy Tiemann of Manifold Recording Studios.

>He co-founded Cygnus Solutions in 1989. His programming contributions to free software include authorship of the GNU C++ compiler and work on the GNU C compiler and the GNU Debugger. Tiemann is featured in the 2001 documentary Revolution OS. Opensource.com profiled him in 2014, calling him one of "open source's great explainers."

https://opensource.com/business/14/8/interview-michael-tiema...

>How to think like open source pioneer Michael Tiemann

>Ancient Greece had its Great Explainers, one of whom was Plato. The open source community has its Great Explainers, one of whom is Michael Tiemann.

>From a conference room on the 10th floor of Red Hat's Raleigh, NC headquarters, Tiemann is prognosticating. The place affords the kind of scope he relishes: broad, sweeping, stretched to a horizon that (this morning, anyway) seems bright. As the company's VP of Open Source Affairs explains what differentiates an open source software company from other firms in a crowded market, he exhibits the idiosyncrasy that has marked his writing for decades: the tendency to pepper his exposition of open source principles with pithy maxims from a diverse range of philosophers, politicians, political economists, and popular writers. It's a habit borne, he says, of the necessity of finding something that resonates with the many skeptics he's confronted over the years—because necessity, he quips (quoting Plato, of course), is the mother of all invention.

[...]

>The view was not always as clear. In 1987, when Tiemann was struggling to find a way into the fast-moving market for compilers, he stumbled upon the writing (and the code) of Richard Stallman. Because the code for the GNU C compiler was open, Tiemann was able to properly study it and port it to new architectures—with results that trumped even the most polished efforts of the time.

[...]

>"By making small contributions to this code, I became a member of a community which aggregated all their enhancements as well," Tiemann says. "And so I put in a little, and I got back a lot, and that seemed to me to be an outrageously great trade. And it seemed to everyone else that they were making a great trade, too."

>So trade he did. In 1989, Tiemann established Cygnus Solutions, the world's first open source software company. Each of the company's three co-founders put up $2,000 to get the business moving (the amount should have been $5,000 apiece, but Tiemann couldn't afford it). But what Plato once said held true: "The beginning in every task is the chief thing." A decade later, Cygnus merged with Red Hat in a deal worth $687 million.

[...]

>More than a decade has passed since Cygnus' merger with Red Hat. From 1999 to 2008, Tiemann worked as Red Hat's CTO and helped architect the relationships that propelled Linux into the enterprise. He also served as president of the Open Source Initiative, stepping down in 2012. As Red Hat's VP of Open Source Affairs, Tiemann continues the meticulous work of tracking open source trends—not all of which excite him.

[...]

>"What encourages me," he says, "is that there is a lot of positive energy from both the younger people getting into open source as well as the older people who have seen the generational ebb and flow of proprietary versus open systems, and I think that there still are a lot of people who are not as interested in seeing what can be destroyed as they are in seeing what can be built."

>Plato was adamant: The world we know today may change, but the perfect forms persist. As a new generation of open-minded advocates take up the cause, one can only hope they build something in harmony with the laws of an open source universe—which Michael Tiemann will gladly explain.

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