Eric S. Raymond
Eric Steven Raymond (often known as ESR) is the author of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" and the present maintainer of "Jargon File" (better known as "The New Hacker's Dictionary"). Though the Jargon File established his original reputation as a historian/anthropologist of the hacker culture, after 1997 he became a leading figure in the open source movement, and is today one of the most famous (and controversial) of hackers.
Many critics accuse him of hijacking the FSF movement for the sake of self promotion. They point out that he has never actually written any significant software. Most of the software that he lists on his webpage are originally authored and copyrighted by other people and ESR usually contributes with bug fixes or a few minor features. They eventually get listed as software that he has "co authored". Even the co-authored software is usually trivial and very often just simple scripts. ESR is known to maintain "co-authorship" of lots of such projects which he "maintains". He has contributed very little free software himself but mainatins a dozen FAQs, the jargon file and writes lots of essays.
Born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1957, Raymond lived on three continents and forgot two languages before settling in Pennsylvania in 1971. His involvement with hacker culture began in 1976, and he wrote his first open source project in 1982.
He was the creator of the C implementation of the INTERCAL programming language. He has also contributed many editing modes to the EMACS editor, co-wrote the GNU ncurses library.
Raymond coined the sentence, "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." He credits Linus Torvalds with the inspiration for this quotation, which he dubs "Linus's law". The "mainstream" source for the quotation is his 1999 book The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary, Sebastopol, California: O'Reilly & Associates; but [1] archives the earliest source (1997), originally distributed freely on the Internet.
After 1997 Raymond became the principal theorist of the open-source movement and one of the founders of the Open Source Initiative. He also took on the job of being the ambassador of open source to the press, business and the mainstream culture. He is a gifted speaker with the moves of a stand-up comic, and has taken his road show to more than fifteen countries on six continents. He is routinely quoted in the mainstream press, and as of 2003 has probably achieved more public visibility than any other hacker.
Raymond's tactics have scored a number of remarkable successes, beginning with the release of the Mozilla source code in 1998, and he is widely credited by both hackers and mainstream observers with having taken the open-source argument to Wall Street more effectively than anyone before him.
Despite his public achievements, Raymond has attracted a certain amount of criticism. It is argued that Raymond has not authored any significant program unlike Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman or Alan Cox. Some view him as a relentless self-promoter, and his forthright rejection of the moral and ethical arguments of RMS and the Free Software Foundation in favor of more a pragmatic, market-friendly stance, has exacerbated some pre-existing political tensions in the community. There has also been some acrimony between Raymond and Linux developers, after the Linux project's refusal to incorporate CML2, an alternative kernel configuration system developed by Raymond himself.
Raymond is an avowed libertarian. He is known to have a strong interest in science fiction, is an enthusiastic amateur musician, and has a black belt in taekwondo. His public advocacy of Second Amendment rights nettles some hackers, but he seems to enjoy the controversy it engenders.
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