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.
Biography
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 email client 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 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, an avowed
anarcho-capitalist, 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 says he has reported to the
FBI and that the agency is taking seriously. Raymond refers to his current situation as "... living inside a cyberpunk novel. A libertarian cyberpunk novel."
Open source
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.
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."
Raymond addressed some of his critics from the software development community in his 1999 essay "Take My Job, Please!", stating that he was willing to "back to the hilt" anyone qualified and willing to take his job and present the case for open source to the world. In February 2005, Raymond stepped down as the president of the
Open Source Initiative.
Raymond accepted
stock options from
VA Software to provide credibility to the company and act as a hired "corporate conscience" He was granted 150,000 share options, which reached a value of $32 million on the day of VA's IPO.. His shares vested over a four year period contingent on him staying on the board. Twelve months later, following the
internet bubble burst, shares of VA had dropped from a high of $242.87 to $14.
Bibliography
- 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.
See also
