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Comment by pwdisswordfishz | Hacker News Reader

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This guy: https://x.com/esrtweet/status/1892142993877954809

So why would I care what some racist Twitter rando thinks?

He wrote The Cathedral and the Bazaar in 1997, an essay about open source software development, and then later a book. He founded the Open Source Initiative (OSI).

I wasn't aware of his political views, especially more recent statements he's made such as the linked tweet above/below.

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

An important part to remember is that Cathedral refers to GCC and Bazaar to EGCS, which was a GCC fork that IIRC ESR was big part of and which ultimately replaced GCC

I don't think ESR had anything to do with egcs directly but, yeah, the egcs/gcc split along with the XEmacs / GNU Emacs fracas were likely inspiration for CatB.

He was always better known as a writer than as a developer - his most significant FOSS contributions were probably fetchmail prior to 2003, and the ill-fated CML2 kernel config system around 2001. I'm not aware of anything of note that he's produced since.

Well, better said would be that ESR was... loud around EGCS? I got into Linux and FOSS essentially just as EGCS took over GCC for good, so I am less clear on details

That's fair! And, yes, he seemed to enjoy rushing into every flamewar he could find back then.

It's one of the reasons this current tweet is so surprising - he's moaning about "drama and politics", "negative useful work", and "shit-stirrers" "who are more annoying to work with than [their] contributions justify", but doesn't seem to realise that all of those complaints could have been made more strongly still about ESR himself, especially when he was in his pomp.

He has always been somewhat on the right of the American political spectrum, mostly rooted there because (people thought) of his maximalist views over the right to own guns. When he (co)started OSI, he was one of the most business-friendly personalities in the FOSS ecosystem.

Over the last 15 years he seems to have shifted further and further into the MAGA spectrum, increasingly exhibiting outright racist views. It might be age, it might be the evolution of the political debate over there, but the fact is that he's utterly unpresentable now, and I'm surprised anyone still listens to what he's basically just an old racist uncle yelling at everyone.

Utterly unpresentable because some don’t like his politics? That’s bizarre.

" If you kick out your Jews and replace them with Black women, that's a 25 to 30-point drop in average IQ. In an individual this would be severe brain damage."

Some politics are not within the realm of what is considered acceptable.

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