"In the beginning, there were Real Programmers." -- Eric S. Raymond
Eric Steven Raymond (born December 4, 1957), often referred to as ESR, is a computer programmer, author and open source software advocate. His name became known within the hacker culture when he picked up maintenance of the "Jargon File" in 1990. After the 1997 publication of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", Raymond became, for a number of years, an unofficial spokesman of the open source movement.
"A critical factor in its success was that the X developers were willing to give the sources away for free in accordance with the hacker ethic, and able to distribute them over the Internet.""Berkeley hackers liked to see themselves as rebels against soulless corporate empires.""For the first time, individual hackers could afford to have home machines comparable in power and storage capacity to the minicomputers of ten years earlier - Unix engines capable of supporting a full development environment and talking to the Internet.""If Unix could present the same face, the same capabilities, on machines of many different types, it could serve as a common software environment for all of them.""In early 1993, a hostile observer might have had grounds for thinking that the Unix story was almost played out, and with it the fortunes of the hacker tribe.""Linux evolved in a completely different way. From nearly the beginning, it was rather casually hacked on by huge numbers of volunteers coordinating only through the Internet.""The ARPAnet was the first transcontinental, high-speed computer network.""The beginnings of the hacker culture as we know it today can be conveniently dated to 1961, the year MIT acquired the first PDP-1.""The workstation-class machines built by Sun and others opened up new worlds for hackers.""Thompson and Ritchie were among the first to realize that hardware and compiler technology had become good enough that an entire operating system could be written in C, and by 1978 the whole environment had been successfully ported to several machines of different types."
Born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1957, Raymond lived in Venezuela before settling in Pennsylvania in 1971. Raymond says his congenital cerebral palsy motivated him to chase a future in computing; his involvement with hacker culture began in 1976, and he contributed to his first free and open source software project in the late 1980s. His primary contributions to open source software have been maintaining the fetchmail mail retrieval agent for a certain time, and gpsd. Other contributions have included Emacs editing modes and portions of libraries like GNU ncurses, giflib/libungif, and libpng; he also contributes code and content to The Battle for Wesnoth. He also wrote CML2, a source code configuration system; while originally intended for the Linux kernel, it was rejected by kernel developers. Raymond attributed this rejection to "kernel list politics".
Raymond is the author of a number of How-to documents and FAQs, many of which are included in the Linux Documentation Project corpus. Raymond's 2003 book The Art of Unix Programming covers Unix history and culture, and modern user tools available for programming and accomplishing tasks in Unix. Raymond has also been the editor of the Jargon File since he adopted it in 1990. Raymond has been the author of the included guide document for NetHack for several versions.
In addition to his computing interests, and sometimes complementing them, Raymond has a strong interest in science fiction and its fandom, is an active Libertarian, and has a black belt in Tae Kwon Do; he is also a neopagan, a political anarchist, and an advocate of the general right to possess and use firearms. Raymond ceased blogging in June 2006, but resumed in June 2008, making reference to "a certain lawsuit now in court" as the cause for the hiatus.
In June 2009 Raymond participated in the establishment of the hacktivist website NedaNet, founded in honor of Neda Soltan "to support the democratic revolution in Iran" via proxy servers, anonymizers, etc. He serves most prominently as the website's public contact, and has in this capacity received on-line threats, including one death threat which he claims he has reported to the FBI which the agency "is taking seriously". Raymond refers to his current situation as "... living inside a cyberpunk novel. A libertarian cyberpunk novel."
Raymond's models of how the open source community works were influenced by an early draft of a paper by Keith Henson describing religious fervor as an overstimulation of evolved responses to social status rewards. More colloquially, Raymond later coined the aphorism "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." He credits Linus Torvalds with the inspiration for this quotation, which he dubs "Linus' Law". The quotation appears in "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", published in 1997. Raymond became a prominent voice in the open source movement and co-founded the Open Source Initiative in 1998. He also took on the self-appointed role of ambassador of open source to the press, business and public. The release of the Mozilla (then Netscape) source code in 1998 was an early accomplishment. Raymond has spoken in more than fifteen countries on six continents, including a lecture at Microsoft. Open Source Advocate Invited To Microsoft
In his open source advocacy, Raymond refused to speculate on whether the "bazaar" development model could be applied to works such as books and music, not wanting to "weaken the winning argument for open-sourcing software by tying it to a potential loser".
Raymond has had a number of public disputes with other figures in the free software movement. He has rejected what he describes as the "very seductive" moral and ethical rhetoric of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, asserting that this is "not because his principles are wrong, but because that kind of language ... simply does not persuade anybody."
In February 2005, Raymond stepped down as the president of the Open Source Initiative.
The New Hacker's Dictionary (editor) (MIT Press, paperback ISBN 0-262-68092-0, cloth ISBN 0-262-18178-9) — printed version of the Jargon File with Raymond listed as the author.
The Cathedral and the Bazaar (O'Reilly; hardcover ISBN 1-56592-724-9, October 1999; paperback ISBN 0-596-00108-8, January 2001) — includes "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", "Homesteading the Noosphere", "The Magic Cauldron" and "Revenge of the Hackers"
The Art of Unix Programming (Addison-Wesley, October 2003; paperback ISBN 0-13-142901-9)
