That said, if you dig into the Jargon File on catb.org, you can find some interesting descriptions of how ESR perceived his hacker[0] community.
[0]Notably, his "hackers" are computer programmers from the ARPANET, USENET, and 1990s Internet cultures. Not cybercriminals or Silicon Valley startup founders.
The only "smear campaign" is his own long term war against the FSF institutionally, RMS personally, and the concept of Free Software itself: he's built his entire career on trying to tear down RMS's life work, while misappropriating and corrupting RMS's original ideas as his own.
But the code ESR has written himself is mediocre and lackluster at best, and trivial and unimportant in comparison to RMS's. (Ask him why he never shipped let alone shared the source code of his unfinished magnum dopeus Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtle NetNews Reader, which he would drone on and on about endlessly and insufferably to people he cornered at science fiction conventions in the 80's, but never finished or released or shared with any bazaar or cathedral.)
He certainly doesn't deserve to be called a hacker, let alone presume to define the meaning of the term. Real hackers from the MIT-AI lab where it originated consider his revisionist politically slanted rewriting-for-profit of the Hacker's Dictionary to be disrespectful parasitical vandalism that doesn't represent the actual hacker culture, just a tool he hijacked, corrupted, and abused to spread his right-wing political ideology.
He made up the ridiculous "many eyes" quote himself, then misnamed it "Linus's Law" to avoid personal responsibility and shift the blame to innocent Linus Torvalds, who never said such a stupid thing, and which HeartBleed and many other eyeballable bugs proved terribly wrong and misguided. About which the salty security expert Theo de Raadt famously said "Oh right, let's hear some of that "many eyes" crap again. 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."
Anything good you've heard about him comes from his own mouth shamelessly and braggadociously bloviating about himself. You can set your watch by his flying monkeys, GamerGate incels, and bulging-at-the-seams electroluminescent spandex clad Tron Guy Jay Maynard swooping in to defend him and downvote brigade any criticism. (I shit you not, Tron Guy is literally and figuratively his biggest fan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0avXmif6Ts )
If that video didn't make you throw up in your mouth, then I could sicken you by linking to examples and posting pages of his reprehensible racist quotes, but I'll leave it at that, and anyone else who cares can google it and find out for themselves. Thanks to our own hn contributor ptacek, people have actually donated tens of thousands of dollars to charity NOT to see his many quotes like "what’s keeping women in general from occupying the vast middle of the programming field is not general intelligence. On the other hand, the average black American has an IQ about 85 and that is pretty much a disqualifier right there. Only the cohort of their bell curve above 3 STDs from median has much hope of matching the capability of the average white programmer", so you'll thank me later for not posting more of them here.
>Raymond has claimed that "Gays experimented with unfettered promiscuity in the 1970s and got AIDS as a consequence", and that "Police who react to a random black male behaving suspiciously who might be in the critical age range as though he is an near-imminent lethal threat, are being rational, not racist." A progressive campaign, "The Great Slate", was successful in raising funds for candidates in part by asking for contributions from tech workers in return for not posting similar quotes by Raymond. Matasano Security employee and Great Slate fundraiser Thomas Ptacek said, "I've been torturing Twitter with lurid Eric S. Raymond quotes for years. Every time I do, 20 people beg me to stop." It is estimated that, as of March 2018, over $30,000 has been raised in this way.
If you really must know more:
I'm curious if this is accurate, because it would seem to be out of character.
At least one of the people in the room when the decision was made has said that CATB was what persuaded the execs.
It helped get some execs on the bandwagon, but Eric Hahn was the biggest high level executive proponent, and I think he genuinely wanted an escape pod, and possibly thereby a better ending, for Netscape via open source. That's what we who actually founded mozilla dot org then did.
2. Firefox was not a "fork", it started as a new project named "mozilla/browser" built on common code. David Hyatt and Blake Ross created it from the cross-platform toolkit (XPFE, XUL) that we'd all worked on at Netscape (Hyatt was there until jumping to Apple in 2001; Blake was intern out of high school on way to Stanford).
The m/b => Phoenix team were fans of Mike Judge's OFFICE SPACE (1999); we hung out on an IRC channel named #me-in-the-ass and plotted (successfully) how to show up idiot upper management at the Netscape division of AOL, by doing a small, fast, customizable browser, while said management bloated and dithered over the "Netscape 4.5" and doomed 5.0 suite of browser/mail/news/editor/etc.
Was it open-source licensed at the same time the flagship Netscape/Mozilla browser was?
All the code was MPL'ed.
Something I read many years ago, maybe a comment here on this site. I appreciate the correction.
It doesn't help that his infamous "Sex Tips for Geeks" essay comes off like it was written by Pepé Le Pew.