The Cellar - View Single Post - Tony, your ESR response post on Slashdot.

Undertoad · 02-24-2001, 08:34 PM

Thanks man.

What happened at /. was: there was a story about ESR's take on something, and someone asked whether ESR was "relevant" or not.

To the uninitiated, "ESR" is geek-eese for Eric S. Raymond, one of the folks behind the entire open-source movement.

This other guy wrote:
<i>Not hardly. If a tree fell on ESR in a forest filled with Linux users, would anyone notice? The guy is, and always has been, all talk. Say what you will about RMS (a communist), Larry Wall (a pseudo-scientist babbler), or Theo deRaadt (a sociopathic cult leader), but they produce working code. Until ESR does more than a simple mail downloader (is he capable of it?), he is simply not needed.</i>

I then wrote:
<i>So, despite the community's protest that people are needed to do things other than write code, the one criterion that you express is that what ESR wrote ISN'T HARD ENOUGH. And then you get modded up in a reply, suggesting that the community agrees with you. You know, the most damning writers at ZD have figured it out. The open source community ensures that end users are systematically locked out. The community has a genuine contempt, not only for "users", but also for the simple. And so it produces sendmail -- and a whole set of similar interfaces that are so complex to configure that you need more 3" thick O'Reilly books. ESR is not given some respect for having coded a utility that you don't care about. ESR is given respect because he helped a gigantic and very powerful set of users to understand the revolutionary and important nature of open source. If open source fails at its alleged "mission", we will be running Microsoft (TM) TCP-IP.NET by 2005 and the state of freedom across the world will be endangered. (OK, allow me a little melodrama.) But ESR will be responsible for holding off that state of affairs for a few years. Do you believe me? Do you care?</i>

Stupidly, I had forgotten that my default post type on /. is "HTML Formatted", and my careful paragraphing of the above text was turned into one big long rant.

02-24-2001, 08:34 PM	#2
Undertoad Radical Centrist Join Date: Jan 2001 Location: Cottage of Prussia Posts: 31,423	Thanks man. What happened at /. was: there was a story about ESR's take on something, and someone asked whether ESR was "relevant" or not. To the uninitiated, "ESR" is geek-eese for Eric S. Raymond, one of the folks behind the entire open-source movement. This other guy wrote: <i>Not hardly. If a tree fell on ESR in a forest filled with Linux users, would anyone notice? The guy is, and always has been, all talk. Say what you will about RMS (a communist), Larry Wall (a pseudo-scientist babbler), or Theo deRaadt (a sociopathic cult leader), but they produce working code. Until ESR does more than a simple mail downloader (is he capable of it?), he is simply not needed.</i> I then wrote: <i>So, despite the community's protest that people are needed to do things other than write code, the one criterion that you express is that what ESR wrote ISN'T HARD ENOUGH. And then you get modded up in a reply, suggesting that the community agrees with you. You know, the most damning writers at ZD have figured it out. The open source community ensures that end users are systematically locked out. The community has a genuine contempt, not only for "users", but also for the simple. And so it produces sendmail -- and a whole set of similar interfaces that are so complex to configure that you need more 3" thick O'Reilly books. ESR is not given some respect for having coded a utility that you don't care about. ESR is given respect because he helped a gigantic and very powerful set of users to understand the revolutionary and important nature of open source. If open source fails at its alleged "mission", we will be running Microsoft (TM) TCP-IP.NET by 2005 and the state of freedom across the world will be endangered. (OK, allow me a little melodrama.) But ESR will be responsible for holding off that state of affairs for a few years. Do you believe me? Do you care?</i> Stupidly, I had forgotten that my default post type on /. is "HTML Formatted", and my careful paragraphing of the above text was turned into one big long rant.