Eric S. Raymond only gets $20/mo on GitTip
gittip.com
gittip.com
Frankly, ESR hasn't contributed that much to the FOSS world, (either as a coder or as an activist) in the last 5-10 years (ie, since 2009/2004), compared to the late 90s/early 2000s.
Nowadays, the only times I hear about him are when he actively trolls the GNU listserv, which is simply counterproductive and only hurts both the free software and open source movements.
For evidence, look at the search results, ordered by date, for "ESR" and mentally filter out the ones that are posts of old articles or have too few points to make the front page: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ESR#!/story/sort_by_date/0/ESR. The two biggest recent posts were ones where he tries to get the FSF and/or GNU projects to "admit" that "open source" is superior. Fortunately, IIRC, both were flagged off the front page relatively quickly (possibly for setting off the flamewar detector).
He also has a long history of turning whatever one-off tool he built for a particular project into its own project (that nobody but him uses or develops) and citing that as well.
He's done some decent work but that doesn't seem to satisfy him. He has to be a leading light and a visionary, and he doesn't seem to know or care that describing oneself as such is off-putting.
2. Even well-known, active coders only receive ~$200/week. The creator of Drupal looks like the highest-paid coder at $420 (I know Chad Whitacre is a coder but I'm guessing much of his compensation is for his valuable work on gittip?).
3. Yes, we've all read Cathedral and the Bazaar -- an influential work in hacker and open source culture. And we've all read his opinionated guide on how to be a hacker. But I had never heard or used any of his listed tools: reposurgeon, deheader, coverity-submit, irkerd, doclifter, and cvs-fast-export. Also, it's not clear if he wrote those or maintains them. I'm sure the GPS and gif libraries he maintains are important, but I wasn't personally familiar with them.
My point is: what is Eric S. Raymond doing these days, other than maintaining a few interesting repos? And why do we owe him a living?
Is this true though? Wikipedia only lists CML2 (the rejected new config system for the kernel). Grepping through Ubuntu's /usr/share/doc doesn't turn up much either (libpng, libgif and some minor stuff).
Some in this thread are asking 'what have you done for me lately?', but would that feeling change if someone had done substantial (and assume again unpaid) work that comprises the foundations of today's preferred toolset. Just an interesting concept to consider.
The Gittip front page lists the top recipients, who are in the $150-650/wk range. The top few recipients are actually making the equivalent of a modest salary solely from Gittip contributions ($500/wk = $26k/yr).
Even if ESR is doing anything worth being paid for (he certainly thinks so), I think at least some people would hesitate on the grounds of his controversial political positions.
http://www.linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/2001022100120OPBZCY