Hacker News Reader

Comment by _delirium | Hacker News Reader

An argument between RMS and ESR over who's the bigger fanatic is not likely to produce very enlightening results...

ESR doesn't strike me as particularly fanatical from what I know of him. Are you thinking of something in particular?

Have you read much of his writing style, or any of his disputes with others? They seem to always end up in hyperbolic, very personal polemics, like this one. Look up his encounters over the years with Bruce Perens, or RMS several times, or anyone ESR considers a "left-liberal". Also, climate scientists are malevolent frauds, in his view, Barack Obama is the worst president and anyone who can't see that is intellectually dishonest, etc., etc.

Honestly I suspect his distaste for Stallman has more to do with general politics than free-software politics in particular; ESR is an anarcho-capitalist and Stallman is leftish.

Not that that makes ESR particularly unique, but I wouldn't nominate him as a representative of even-keeled pragmatists; his temperament is much closer to the firebrand type that RMS and Theo de Raadt represent.

The difference is RMS is a fanatic with tons of accomplishments in his bag.

Blog Noise to work ratio is too high in ESR's case. I don't know what his contributions to software are. Or when was the last time I heard some major contribution from him. He always seems to find something to bad mouth.

I would consider RMS a super achiever compared to ESR.

Right, RMS at least used to write code. ESR has always been a creepy hacker fanboy, latching on to and idolizing hacker culture, but has never been part of it, and never produced any code.

ESR did not bring us emacs or gcc, but he has made some contributions:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/software.html

I'm most grateful for vc-mode in emacs.

(I'm merely addressing a factual point and in no way excusing the way ESR treats RMS in writing.)

Certainly "never produced any code" was hyperbole, but "contributions" is being pretty generous. Hobbling together some random scripts nobody has ever used isn't really contributing. Most of what he has tried to contribute has been rejected.

giflib is probably his most important project in terms of how many people use it

gpsd is probably the project he's working on right now with the most potential for widespread use and importance

forgeplucker http://home.gna.org/forgeplucker/ (oddly not linked at http://www.catb.org/~esr/software.html) is probably the project he's working on right now that's the most interesting (and ironically something i expect RMS would be a huge fan of)

""" imgsizer:

This is a nifty little HTML authoring tool that will generate correct Netscape-style WIDTH and HEIGHT parameters for each of your IMG tags on an HTML page. This will allow the text portions of the page to load much faster. Requires that you have either identify(1) or a recent file(1) and rdjpegcom(1) installed. The RPM is architecture-independent. Requires Python. """

Ok then.

huh? did you have a point?

I'm curious, how does ESR make a living? He seems to spend a lot of time running his personal site (which carries no charges or ads) and has written a bunch of Open Source software. I don't see him doing anything that would put money into his bank account, or is he being sponsored by some company? If so who?

I am going to simply go by what ESR himself says, which is that his wife is a lawyer and so she goes and works every day which funds his ability to stay at home and write blog posts about the intellectual inferiority of black people and how the poor deserve no government help. No I am not making this up.

You might as well be making up the part about black people. I checked, and ESR's actual argument is that black people have a lower average IQ than caucasians even after adjusting for things like socioeconomic status and childhood nutrition, that this IQ difference has significant effects on the observed distributions of things like income and crime, and that these same statistics prove that racial discrimination against individual people is idiotic, since the relatively weak Bayesian evidence from someone's race is greatly outweighed by, say, actually talking to that person for half a minute. (He makes exactly the same claim about caucasians having a lower average IQ than Ashkenazi Jews, BTW.) In addition to these claims about fact, he also makes the normative claim that racism is immoral.

I know that doesn't make quite as snazzy a sound-bite as "the intellectual inferiority of black people".

From time to time I go slumming and read the kind of thing Mr. Raymond has written, things like:

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4278

He quotes something which appears to be backed up by statistics, then carries off into some social speculation. He rails against “political correctness” muzzling the truth. I have read similar things from people who feel a need to “have an honest conversation about the actions of Israel in the Middle East.” And like wise from people who can cite in detail the various horrors inflicted by the legal system against men who are tricked or trapped into biological paternity. All quite possibly true facts to share, of course.

It’s a massive Ad Hominem on my part, but I can’t help but wonder when I read such passionate words, “Why is this person fixated on this particular topic?” We all have our passions, some of us have crusades. What compels a programmer to take it upon himself to fight the injustice of a society that walks on eggshells about the various differences between the “races?”

I’m not going to say he’s a racist. I’ll say instead he’s a man fixated on race. And I’ll wield the Ad Hominem hammer again and suggest, although he may be a pragmatic voice for the open source movement, where society is concerned he comes across as every bit as fanatic as his accusations.

It’s a massive Ad Hominem on my part, but I can’t help but wonder when I read such passionate words, “Why is this person fixated on this particular topic?”

Because in their view, which may or may not be correct, they are injustices which receive very little mainstream attention. Is that not enough?

I’m not going to say he’s a racist.

I'm not going to say that John Doe has ever had any inappropriate relations with his students.

Because in their view, which may or may not be correct, they are injustices which receive very little mainstream attention. Is that not enough?

Enough for you, not enough for me. That’s how human behaviour works. You may meet someone who goes on and on about men’s rights and think, “here is a fellow who has encountered injustices which receive very little mainstream attention, how perfectly ordinary.” Someone else may beet the same fellow and be disquieted by their choice of injustice which receives very little mainstream attention they have picked as their fixation.

And I didn’t say he’s a racist. Pointless waste of time when discussing a man who wrote an essay asking for the word “racist” to be defined in such a way that he explicitly isn’t one. Likewise, it would be a waste of time to insinuate that Mr. Does had inappropriate relations with his students in the middle of a debate about the word “inappropriate.”

If you and I can agree on a definition of the word, I’ll happily denounce or exonerate Mr. Raymond. Until then, I’ll use a made-up-phrase so there’s no misunderstanding: He strikes me as a man fixated on race. Do you disagree?

IIRC he was given a chunk of stock in a Linux IPO and while he lost most of its value in the dot-com crash, it still left him some spare change; add on consulting, royalties, the occasional job like being president, basic nerd frugal living, and you probably have the whole story.

Shrinking book royalties and the earnings of his wife, who is a lawyer.

I believe he was employed by the Open Source Initiative (which he co-founded) for some years, as its President. So indirectly funded by the companies that donated to OSI.

Many years after found the Open Source Initiative, ESR stated publicly that he never made any money from it, and having read most of his writings from that period and a lot of commentary on the organization, I find that statement credible.

Also, he has claimed at least a couple of times over the years that he was (at the time of the claim) a consulting programmer.

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

and, for more of Eric's accomplishments:

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

This blog post seemed pretty levelheaded to me.

I think in general people can be levelheaded thinkers in one domain and dogmatic in another. So maybe ESR is dogmatic about other things, but this doesn't seem to be one of them from my perspective.

Are you familiar with his views about Islam or Homosexuality? Those seem pretty fanatical to me, they are completely biased and downright offensive and illiterate. He equates homosexuality with paedophilia, denies HIV is the sole cause of AIDS and believes in a conspiracy to hide the true causes, and calls for the murder of religious leaders of the middle east equating them with animals. I tried multiple times to discuss this theories with him, but he called me a "marxist anti-american fag" (sic), a label that even if undisputed gives him no logical arguments against any refutation of his bizarre theories nor justifies his calls for action or even sometimes genocide.

For some time already his mind has been drifting in a sea of obscurantist choosing of statistics and a convenient selection of right-winged american-exceptionalist conspiracy theories.

I could link to his twisted essays, but although biased the entry in Rational Wiki about him sums most of the hard facts, though I suggest you ignore their opinion and go read the compiled cited writing of ESR. http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond

I dislike seeing someone's name smeared in a vague way. A bit of googling brought up the essay you mentioned regarding homosexuality, pederasty, and pedophilia:

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=26

(Vagueness, begone!)

The rationalwiki article linked above links to that article and several others. So IMHO your charge of "name smeared in a vague way" is incorrect.

Vile. `pvarangot' didn't exaggerate.

That RationalWiki page is terrible; I had a high opinion of RationalWiki before that. (No refs; just read the content headings for what I mean)

This all apart from what I think of ESR.

Well, that's undeniably pretty fanatical.

I have only read his technical articles that get posted to news aggregator sites -- I don't particularly care about what strange political beliefs some washed-up developer has -- and hadn't noticed anything so vile as this.

I think he still (occasionally) makes good points about development and open source, but his political and sociological views are very immature.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com