It would be foolish of me to pretend and try to hide my dislike for Eric Raymond, but it comes down not to a personal problem, but a problem with the way he presents himself.

In this case, the juxtaposition of the quality of the code (which was truly poor) and Raymond's opinion of himself (recall that he claimed to be a Core Linux Developer at one point) made plain the problem that many people have with the man.

Interestingly, his response to my criticism was not to say something like "You are right, but don't be nasty about it". Instead he wrote a blog posting going on about how right he is. Oddly, I share his concerns about HTML parsing, but I think he's wrong to not use an HTML parser and do everything by hand. Having done a lot of screen scraping work dealing with all the edge cases is a pain.

And, also, Raymond claims to be very thick-skinned: http://catb.org/~esr/writings/take-my-job-please.html