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When Hemos mentioned this book, at first I didn't realize that it had actually been published in dead-tree form - or more precisely, I didn't realize it hadn't been published in dead-tree form long ago, and I was wondering why he was talking about reviewing it now. Obviously I spend too much time on the net when I can no longer distinguish between webpages and books. The Cathedral and the Bazaar author Eric S. Raymond pages 268 publisher O'Reilly and Associates rating 9/10 reviewer Michael Sims ISBN 1565927249 summary Several of ESR's essays on open source and Linux; dressed, stuffed, and garnished Probably most slashdot readers have at least heard of Eric Raymond. This book collects several of his more famous essays into a single volume.

Raymond is intelligent and literate, and makes his arguments about the benefits of open source in ways that are calculated to convince corporations that there's more money to be made with open code than closed in many situations. He's one of the relatively few people who can write first-hand accounts of long-running, successful open source projects, and can write authoritatively about the hacker community in the early days of the internet.

The essays make good reading, if you're into computers and software at all. Sometimes there are people who are good at something who nevertheless can't write about it. Bill Gates is probably a good example - he's good at what he does, but he sure as hell can't convey his knowledge. I've read Andy Grove's book about his management experiences, and I wasn't impressed by it either - again, it seemed like there was someone who knew how to do something but couldn't explain it (and haven't we all had teachers like that?).

Raymond is not only a gifted hacker, but an excellent writer as well. He manages to convey information about the culture one has to manage, which turns out to be very good way to teach someone how to manage it; or at least it was for me, anyway.

These essays are pretty much required reading, I would say, for anyone running a software company today. If you want to set up an open source project, there's no better information available. The early history of hacking is interesting and of course he's got a good handle on how and why Linux has been so successful.

The only difficulty I have in recommending the book, in fact, is that it's available at no cost on ESR's website. Yes, the essays are all material that's previously been available - indeed, I'd read several of them before. Supposedly they've been revised and expanded for the book - I'm not going to scan them line-by-line to check - but certainly the ideas expressed in the essays haven't changed from the web versions. Frugal readers might easily decide that free documents off a website make better reading than a purchased book.

On the other hand, a book is easier to read than a web page in most cases. And you can't give webpages as holiday presents to your pointy-haired boss who wants to keep your company's code totally closed. So perhaps there's a market for it after all...

The book contains the essays "A Brief History of Hackerdom", "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", "Homesteading the Noosphere", "The Magic Cauldron", "The Revenge of the Hackers", and "How to Become a Hacker".

Pick this book up at fatbrain.

When Hemos mentioned this book, at first I didn't realize that it had actually been published in dead-tree form - or more precisely, I didn't realize it hadn't been published in dead-tree form long ago, and I was wondering why he was talking about reviewing it now. Obviously I spend too much time on the net when I can no longer distinguish between webpages and books. The Cathedral and the Bazaar author Eric S. Raymond pages 268 publisher O'Reilly and Associates rating 9/10 reviewer Michael Sims ISBN 1565927249 summary Several of ESR's essays on open source and Linux; dressed, stuffed, and garnished Probably most slashdot readers have at least heard of Eric Raymond. This book collects several of his more famous essays into a single volume.

Raymond is intelligent and literate, and makes his arguments about the benefits of open source in ways that are calculated to convince corporations that there's more money to be made with open code than closed in many situations. He's one of the relatively few people who can write first-hand accounts of long-running, successful open source projects, and can write authoritatively about the hacker community in the early days of the internet.

The essays make good reading, if you're into computers and software at all. Sometimes there are people who are good at something who nevertheless can't write about it. Bill Gates is probably a good example - he's good at what he does, but he sure as hell can't convey his knowledge. I've read Andy Grove's book about his management experiences, and I wasn't impressed by it either - again, it seemed like there was someone who knew how to do something but couldn't explain it (and haven't we all had teachers like that?).

Raymond is not only a gifted hacker, but an excellent writer as well. He manages to convey information about the culture one has to manage, which turns out to be very good way to teach someone how to manage it; or at least it was for me, anyway.

These essays are pretty much required reading, I would say, for anyone running a software company today. If you want to set up an open source project, there's no better information available. The early history of hacking is interesting and of course he's got a good handle on how and why Linux has been so successful.

The only difficulty I have in recommending the book, in fact, is that it's available at no cost on ESR's website. Yes, the essays are all material that's previously been available - indeed, I'd read several of them before. Supposedly they've been revised and expanded for the book - I'm not going to scan them line-by-line to check - but certainly the ideas expressed in the essays haven't changed from the web versions. Frugal readers might easily decide that free documents off a website make better reading than a purchased book.

On the other hand, a book is easier to read than a web page in most cases. And you can't give webpages as holiday presents to your pointy-haired boss who wants to keep your company's code totally closed. So perhaps there's a market for it after all...

The book contains the essays "A Brief History of Hackerdom", "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", "Homesteading the Noosphere", "The Magic Cauldron", "The Revenge of the Hackers", and "How to Become a Hacker".

Pick this book up at fatbrain.

ESR writes "Are you ready for Burn All GIFs Day?. On November 5, webmasters all over the world will convert their sites to eliminate all GIFs. Please join this effort and show Unisys that the net will not tolerate its sleazy attempt at a $5000-per-site shakedown based on the LZW patent. For tools to make converting your entire site easy, see the gif2png home page. "

Cycon writes "ESR has posted his response to Nikolai Bezroukov's criticism of The Cathedral and the Bazaar posted earlier today. ESR states that he 'welcomes such criticism' but that Nikolai 'adds almost nothing useful to the debate.'"

Cycon writes "ESR has posted his response to Nikolai Bezroukov's criticism of The Cathedral and the Bazaar posted earlier today. ESR states that he 'welcomes such criticism' but that Nikolai 'adds almost nothing useful to the debate.'"

This week's interview guest with Eric S. Raymond. We got a *lot* of good questions, forwarded the moderators' favorites to Eric, and he not only answered the ones we sent him but - extra cool - picked some more out of the crowd and answered them, too. Read the complete session (below) and if you have something you want to add, go ahead. If Eric has time, he'll jump in and respond, because, well, he's just that kind of guy. ;) Note: questions marked with * are the ones Eric added to the moderators' selections.

chromatic asks:
Astute readers know why you've reluctantly taken a position as a Linux evangelist, open source sociologist, and prime target. Taking the opposite approach, is there anything which would convince you to step down, that your posts were no longer necessary?

This is not meant to be inflammatory ... it's just a roundabout way of asking how far along your goals are, and what your plans will be if you ever meet them.

ESR answers:
Three things could cause me to step down:

• One: someone emerging to do the public-advocate job clearly better than I do.
• Two: Linux's market share going over 50%. (Cool down, BSD guys -- I'd be equally pleased to see some other open-source Unix win, it just doesn't seen very likely at this point).
• Three: a collapse in Microsoft's stock price. That would mean the end of effective FUD and countermarketing against open source.

ivo asks:
A while ago, we read from you that being the Open Source advocate you are was wearing you down and influencing your life very badly. Did you cut down on advocating and did it help? In other words, did you get your life back?

ESR answers:
Not really. Something more remarkable happened instead; the community responded to my distress call by growing up a little. I got letters of apology from some of the worst flamers. Many people in the rest of the community started pressuring the pinheads who had been making my job harder to shut up or get constructive.

I have also cut down somewhat on my travel schedule, but not as much as I thought earlier this year I would have to. I'm also demanding (and getting) better travel conditions -- business class instead of the cheap seats in coach. It makes a difference, more of one than I would have thought.

Stephen Williams asks*:
I'm glad to see that, after a three-year break, the Jargon File has been updated over the past few months. Is version 5.0.0 in the works? Are there any plans to release an update to the print version, The New Hacker's Dictionary, any time soon?

ESR answers:
I've discussed the possibility with people at O'Reilly. That might be my second-to-next book, after "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" and before "The Art Of Unix Programming" (which is about half-done now but could take me another nine months to finish). Whether I go with O'Reilly or the publisher of the previous editions (MIT Press) the fourth edition of TNHD seems likely to come out next year sometime.

Tom Christiansen asks:
I don't know how to ask this question without it sounding like stirring the pot, but what about the growing chasm between free software (giftware) and GNU software (the viral kind, not the nice LGPL kind)? This is a real issue for some people in some situations. Think about the many BSD resellers and vendors who have custom packaging in highly competitive fields, like video editing? Doesn't the friction hurt everyone? Apple has turned to BSD not Linux, and the GPL is cited as one reason why. This seems to be devisive. There are no end of flamewars on /. and elsewhere, and the heat diminishes the light. What kind of reconciliation is possible? Or is "take no prisoners" just the way it has to work?

ESR answers:
I don't see a chasm there, Tom. After all, we're all still writing and exchanging code. We're all using basically the same set of licenses. I don't think there are properly two different movements at all, outside the imaginations of a few rather fanatical partisans on both sides.

Here is the reality test: if you're running a project and someone sends you a patch, will you stop to enquire whether that person is a member of the correct faction before you apply it? I don't think so...

So despite the verbal fireworks and philosophical disputes, we're all hackers together. What unites us is more important than what divides us.

Tet asks:
You say you want to live in a world where software doesn't suck. I couldn't agree more. However, do you see closed source software on an open source OS as a step in the right direction, or just likely to be a more stable platform on which to run your potentially bug-ridden software?

ESR answers:
Step in the right direction, definitely. As more and more infrastructure goes open, and the remaimning closed-source applications increasingly use it for leverage, the overall quality of the applications will go up.

planet_hoth*:
Recent interest shown by large commercial tech companies (IBM, SGI, Sun) seems to signal a new chapter in the history of Linux. Do you see the participation of these companies strengthening the linux communitity? Destroying it? Or transforming it into something completely different?

ESR answers:
Look around you. What do you see, compared to a year ago?

Do you see fewer Linux hackers writing open source, or more? Do you see fewer hackers getting *paid* to write open source, or more? I think the answer is pretty clear.

Do you see our designs, or our licenses, or our coding practices being changed in any significant way by corporate participation? Again, I think the answer is pretty clear.

The truth is, they're not transforming us. We're transforming them.

asad asks*:
I know that you are on the board of directors at VA Linux, what does your job entail?

ESR answers:
My job at VA mostly involves sitting in a board meeting once a month asking searching questions about what the firm is doing and why. My role there (as Larry Augustin describes it) is to be the official corporate conscience. This mainly involves nipping bad ideas in the bud, before they flower into something that would piss off the hacker community. I have not had to do this often.

shawnhargreaves asks:
You've always been involved in hacker projects outside of just coding (eg. the Jargon File), but over the last year or so the spokesperson role seems to have grown into a fulltime job. How long is it since you last sat down to write a major piece of software? Do you expect to go back to fulltime development work anytime soon, and if so, what would you work on? How do you manage to cope with the withdrawal symptoms?

ESR answers:
An astute question ;-). I haven't sat down to write a major piece of software from scratch in months, but I am continuing to maintain fetchmail. I just took over the gif2png beta code with Greg Roelofs's consent; the 1.0.0 version might be out by the time you read this. Today I did some work on gnuplot, bringing the PNG driver up to date.

If I get to go full-time again soon, I want to go back to work on Trove, the distributed web-based code-archiving system I designed last year. I'd also like to work with Guido van Rossum on Python 1.6; there are some long-time wishlist features like rich comparisons and a full lambda facility that I care enough about to implement myself. I also have a strategy-gaming system I wrote back in the 1980s that I'd like to put a modern (Web-based) interface on. Finally, having contributed a bit of code to GNOME (the network-monitor applet) I'd like to balance things by doing something for KDE.

meersan asks:
This has probably been asked before, but I can't recall seeing the answer to it anywhere. What originally led you to write The Cathedral and the Bazaar? -- what I'm interested in is if there was some event or impetus that prompted you to write it down. Obviously you'd have no way of predicting the firestorm that followed, but it's always intriguing to know about the spark that started it all

ESR answers:
I wrote CatB as a way of coping with my astonishment in the face of the Linux phenomenon. What I observed was that the community around Linux had evolved a way to write software that (a) was tremendously effective, (b) violated the classic Brooks's Law rules, and (c) was completely unconscious! Nobody reflected on what they were doing; it was practice without theory. I wrote CatB as an attempt to help my tribe become more conscious about what it has been doing.

Q*bert asks:
We all know that you are a staunch advocate of libertarianism. Do you see the open-source / free-software movement turning into a larger political push for libertarian, minimal government?

What conferences are you planning to attend this year? Do you have plans for organizing Geeks with Guns outings during them? If so, is there a mailing list or some other source of information about how to join?

ESR answers:
No comment on that first question. But, if you could see my face, I'm wearing a very evil grin....

See my speaking calendar for the conferences I plan to attend. As for GWG, there's no mailing list; would you like to host one? I rely on local organizers to find a range, and I don't have one for Atlanta Linux Showcase yet.

banky asks:
Linux, like all things in the computer world, will eventually become obsolete or maybe just too much work to keep "up to date". Linus (er, Dr. Torvalds) even said in his "Open Sources" essay that (paraphrasing) someone else could come along and write something better which will take Linux's place. How long do you think before someone will have an offering that will obsolete (or at least prove a competitor to) Linux and the BSD's?

ESR answers:
I doubt Linux will have a real technical competitor for a long time, because I think it will probably just absorb new architectural ideas, amoeba-like, as they evolve. Twenty years from now the core APIs may have grown and changed tremendously, but we'll still think of it as the `same' codebase and call it Linux :-).

scumdamn asks:
Is the friction between Gnome and KDE, BSD and GPL, Free Software and Open Source, and the other sources of flame war a bad thing or a good thing for the movement? Many people seem to feel that the competition is devisive, but isn't it the opposite? We're always preaching that competition is a good thing for the entire market, but then we complain when any of our pet projects are pitted head to head with another. The passion felt by the proponents of each philosophy seems to result in better, more quality work. Isn't this proof that competition is the Good Thing we've been saying it is all along?

ESR answers:
I think you answered your own question :-).

cemerson asks:
Which of the coders working on open source projects do you admire the most? A particular big name like Linus, or someone less well-known?

ESR answers:
Hmmm. I don't think there's anyone I can say I admire the most. There's a level of ability beyond which trying to make comparisons between people just gets silly, because each of the people that good has become a sort of perfect master of his own domain. Linus. RMS. Larry Wall. Guido van Rossum. James Gosling. Going further back, Ken Thompson or Dennis Ritchie. Anyway, I find these guys have gotten their fill of being admired, so I try to be friends with them instead.

K asks:
Why isn't there an entry for "free software" in the Jargon Dictionary? Was this a politically-motivated decision?

ESR answers:
Zounds! You know, until this moment, I didn't realize that entry was missing.

I don't think you want me to write it, though. I would find it hard to avoid using phrases like "rhetorical millstone around our necks" and "held us back for fifteen years". Care to submit one yourself?

Paul Crowley asks:
In Understand my job, please! you described Bruce Perens's proposal that we have a team of Linux advocates sharing the load as "glib". Could you say more about why you feel this way - isn't it more likely that a job where the load is shared would be more attractive?

ESR answers:
I think I answered that question in the same paragraph you quoted. What makes the job rough isn't the workload, it's the second-guessers and snipers from the sidelines -- among whom Bruce was, at the time, nearly the worst. Connect the dots yourself.

jflynn asks:
Starting an open source project from nothing but people with a common interest is difficult. It's been my experience that it is very easy to founder with a bazaar approach to architecture and design. The issues tend to get confused with religious wars about toolkits and license choice, and just a lot of differing opinions about how to best structure a program, no one of which may be *obviously* better.

Is it essential for individuals to first create a working model, incomplete and buggy it may be, before applying bazaar development? Or what would you suggest in terms of managing a bazaar approach to creating programs from a bare idea?

ESR answers:
I wouldn't. I think you're right; the successful projects have a core of individual vision around which the bazaar community nucleates.

elutfall asks*:
Since, as we all know, cheese is the most powerful substance in the universe, I was wondering what your favorite source of ultimate power is?

ESR answers:
That would have to be sex, because I'm allergic to cheese.

--

Next week: Bruce Sterling.

This week's interview guest with Eric S. Raymond. We got a *lot* of good questions, forwarded the moderators' favorites to Eric, and he not only answered the ones we sent him but - extra cool - picked some more out of the crowd and answered them, too. Read the complete session (below) and if you have something you want to add, go ahead. If Eric has time, he'll jump in and respond, because, well, he's just that kind of guy. ;) Note: questions marked with * are the ones Eric added to the moderators' selections.

chromatic asks:
Astute readers know why you've reluctantly taken a position as a Linux evangelist, open source sociologist, and prime target. Taking the opposite approach, is there anything which would convince you to step down, that your posts were no longer necessary?

This is not meant to be inflammatory ... it's just a roundabout way of asking how far along your goals are, and what your plans will be if you ever meet them.

ESR answers:
Three things could cause me to step down:

• One: someone emerging to do the public-advocate job clearly better than I do.
• Two: Linux's market share going over 50%. (Cool down, BSD guys -- I'd be equally pleased to see some other open-source Unix win, it just doesn't seen very likely at this point).
• Three: a collapse in Microsoft's stock price. That would mean the end of effective FUD and countermarketing against open source.

ivo asks:
A while ago, we read from you that being the Open Source advocate you are was wearing you down and influencing your life very badly. Did you cut down on advocating and did it help? In other words, did you get your life back?

ESR answers:
Not really. Something more remarkable happened instead; the community responded to my distress call by growing up a little. I got letters of apology from some of the worst flamers. Many people in the rest of the community started pressuring the pinheads who had been making my job harder to shut up or get constructive.

I have also cut down somewhat on my travel schedule, but not as much as I thought earlier this year I would have to. I'm also demanding (and getting) better travel conditions -- business class instead of the cheap seats in coach. It makes a difference, more of one than I would have thought.

Stephen Williams asks*:
I'm glad to see that, after a three-year break, the Jargon File has been updated over the past few months. Is version 5.0.0 in the works? Are there any plans to release an update to the print version, The New Hacker's Dictionary, any time soon?

ESR answers:
I've discussed the possibility with people at O'Reilly. That might be my second-to-next book, after "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" and before "The Art Of Unix Programming" (which is about half-done now but could take me another nine months to finish). Whether I go with O'Reilly or the publisher of the previous editions (MIT Press) the fourth edition of TNHD seems likely to come out next year sometime.

Tom Christiansen asks:
I don't know how to ask this question without it sounding like stirring the pot, but what about the growing chasm between free software (giftware) and GNU software (the viral kind, not the nice LGPL kind)? This is a real issue for some people in some situations. Think about the many BSD resellers and vendors who have custom packaging in highly competitive fields, like video editing? Doesn't the friction hurt everyone? Apple has turned to BSD not Linux, and the GPL is cited as one reason why. This seems to be devisive. There are no end of flamewars on /. and elsewhere, and the heat diminishes the light. What kind of reconciliation is possible? Or is "take no prisoners" just the way it has to work?

ESR answers:
I don't see a chasm there, Tom. After all, we're all still writing and exchanging code. We're all using basically the same set of licenses. I don't think there are properly two different movements at all, outside the imaginations of a few rather fanatical partisans on both sides.

Here is the reality test: if you're running a project and someone sends you a patch, will you stop to enquire whether that person is a member of the correct faction before you apply it? I don't think so...

So despite the verbal fireworks and philosophical disputes, we're all hackers together. What unites us is more important than what divides us.

Tet asks:
You say you want to live in a world where software doesn't suck. I couldn't agree more. However, do you see closed source software on an open source OS as a step in the right direction, or just likely to be a more stable platform on which to run your potentially bug-ridden software?

ESR answers:
Step in the right direction, definitely. As more and more infrastructure goes open, and the remaimning closed-source applications increasingly use it for leverage, the overall quality of the applications will go up.

planet_hoth*:
Recent interest shown by large commercial tech companies (IBM, SGI, Sun) seems to signal a new chapter in the history of Linux. Do you see the participation of these companies strengthening the linux communitity? Destroying it? Or transforming it into something completely different?

ESR answers:
Look around you. What do you see, compared to a year ago?

Do you see fewer Linux hackers writing open source, or more? Do you see fewer hackers getting *paid* to write open source, or more? I think the answer is pretty clear.

Do you see our designs, or our licenses, or our coding practices being changed in any significant way by corporate participation? Again, I think the answer is pretty clear.

The truth is, they're not transforming us. We're transforming them.

asad asks*:
I know that you are on the board of directors at VA Linux, what does your job entail?

ESR answers:
My job at VA mostly involves sitting in a board meeting once a month asking searching questions about what the firm is doing and why. My role there (as Larry Augustin describes it) is to be the official corporate conscience. This mainly involves nipping bad ideas in the bud, before they flower into something that would piss off the hacker community. I have not had to do this often.

shawnhargreaves asks:
You've always been involved in hacker projects outside of just coding (eg. the Jargon File), but over the last year or so the spokesperson role seems to have grown into a fulltime job. How long is it since you last sat down to write a major piece of software? Do you expect to go back to fulltime development work anytime soon, and if so, what would you work on? How do you manage to cope with the withdrawal symptoms?

ESR answers:
An astute question ;-). I haven't sat down to write a major piece of software from scratch in months, but I am continuing to maintain fetchmail. I just took over the gif2png beta code with Greg Roelofs's consent; the 1.0.0 version might be out by the time you read this. Today I did some work on gnuplot, bringing the PNG driver up to date.

If I get to go full-time again soon, I want to go back to work on Trove, the distributed web-based code-archiving system I designed last year. I'd also like to work with Guido van Rossum on Python 1.6; there are some long-time wishlist features like rich comparisons and a full lambda facility that I care enough about to implement myself. I also have a strategy-gaming system I wrote back in the 1980s that I'd like to put a modern (Web-based) interface on. Finally, having contributed a bit of code to GNOME (the network-monitor applet) I'd like to balance things by doing something for KDE.

meersan asks:
This has probably been asked before, but I can't recall seeing the answer to it anywhere. What originally led you to write The Cathedral and the Bazaar? -- what I'm interested in is if there was some event or impetus that prompted you to write it down. Obviously you'd have no way of predicting the firestorm that followed, but it's always intriguing to know about the spark that started it all

ESR answers:
I wrote CatB as a way of coping with my astonishment in the face of the Linux phenomenon. What I observed was that the community around Linux had evolved a way to write software that (a) was tremendously effective, (b) violated the classic Brooks's Law rules, and (c) was completely unconscious! Nobody reflected on what they were doing; it was practice without theory. I wrote CatB as an attempt to help my tribe become more conscious about what it has been doing.

Q*bert asks:
We all know that you are a staunch advocate of libertarianism. Do you see the open-source / free-software movement turning into a larger political push for libertarian, minimal government?

What conferences are you planning to attend this year? Do you have plans for organizing Geeks with Guns outings during them? If so, is there a mailing list or some other source of information about how to join?

ESR answers:
No comment on that first question. But, if you could see my face, I'm wearing a very evil grin....

See my speaking calendar for the conferences I plan to attend. As for GWG, there's no mailing list; would you like to host one? I rely on local organizers to find a range, and I don't have one for Atlanta Linux Showcase yet.

banky asks:
Linux, like all things in the computer world, will eventually become obsolete or maybe just too much work to keep "up to date". Linus (er, Dr. Torvalds) even said in his "Open Sources" essay that (paraphrasing) someone else could come along and write something better which will take Linux's place. How long do you think before someone will have an offering that will obsolete (or at least prove a competitor to) Linux and the BSD's?

ESR answers:
I doubt Linux will have a real technical competitor for a long time, because I think it will probably just absorb new architectural ideas, amoeba-like, as they evolve. Twenty years from now the core APIs may have grown and changed tremendously, but we'll still think of it as the `same' codebase and call it Linux :-).

scumdamn asks:
Is the friction between Gnome and KDE, BSD and GPL, Free Software and Open Source, and the other sources of flame war a bad thing or a good thing for the movement? Many people seem to feel that the competition is devisive, but isn't it the opposite? We're always preaching that competition is a good thing for the entire market, but then we complain when any of our pet projects are pitted head to head with another. The passion felt by the proponents of each philosophy seems to result in better, more quality work. Isn't this proof that competition is the Good Thing we've been saying it is all along?

ESR answers:
I think you answered your own question :-).

cemerson asks:
Which of the coders working on open source projects do you admire the most? A particular big name like Linus, or someone less well-known?

ESR answers:
Hmmm. I don't think there's anyone I can say I admire the most. There's a level of ability beyond which trying to make comparisons between people just gets silly, because each of the people that good has become a sort of perfect master of his own domain. Linus. RMS. Larry Wall. Guido van Rossum. James Gosling. Going further back, Ken Thompson or Dennis Ritchie. Anyway, I find these guys have gotten their fill of being admired, so I try to be friends with them instead.

K asks:
Why isn't there an entry for "free software" in the Jargon Dictionary? Was this a politically-motivated decision?

ESR answers:
Zounds! You know, until this moment, I didn't realize that entry was missing.

I don't think you want me to write it, though. I would find it hard to avoid using phrases like "rhetorical millstone around our necks" and "held us back for fifteen years". Care to submit one yourself?

Paul Crowley asks:
In Understand my job, please! you described Bruce Perens's proposal that we have a team of Linux advocates sharing the load as "glib". Could you say more about why you feel this way - isn't it more likely that a job where the load is shared would be more attractive?

ESR answers:
I think I answered that question in the same paragraph you quoted. What makes the job rough isn't the workload, it's the second-guessers and snipers from the sidelines -- among whom Bruce was, at the time, nearly the worst. Connect the dots yourself.

jflynn asks:
Starting an open source project from nothing but people with a common interest is difficult. It's been my experience that it is very easy to founder with a bazaar approach to architecture and design. The issues tend to get confused with religious wars about toolkits and license choice, and just a lot of differing opinions about how to best structure a program, no one of which may be *obviously* better.

Is it essential for individuals to first create a working model, incomplete and buggy it may be, before applying bazaar development? Or what would you suggest in terms of managing a bazaar approach to creating programs from a bare idea?

ESR answers:
I wouldn't. I think you're right; the successful projects have a core of individual vision around which the bazaar community nucleates.

elutfall asks*:
Since, as we all know, cheese is the most powerful substance in the universe, I was wondering what your favorite source of ultimate power is?

ESR answers:
That would have to be sex, because I'm allergic to cheese.

--

Next week: Bruce Sterling.

This week's interview guest with Eric S. Raymond. We got a *lot* of good questions, forwarded the moderators' favorites to Eric, and he not only answered the ones we sent him but - extra cool - picked some more out of the crowd and answered them, too. Read the complete session (below) and if you have something you want to add, go ahead. If Eric has time, he'll jump in and respond, because, well, he's just that kind of guy. ;) Note: questions marked with * are the ones Eric added to the moderators' selections.

chromatic asks:
Astute readers know why you've reluctantly taken a position as a Linux evangelist, open source sociologist, and prime target. Taking the opposite approach, is there anything which would convince you to step down, that your posts were no longer necessary?

This is not meant to be inflammatory ... it's just a roundabout way of asking how far along your goals are, and what your plans will be if you ever meet them.

ESR answers:
Three things could cause me to step down:

• One: someone emerging to do the public-advocate job clearly better than I do.
• Two: Linux's market share going over 50%. (Cool down, BSD guys -- I'd be equally pleased to see some other open-source Unix win, it just doesn't seen very likely at this point).
• Three: a collapse in Microsoft's stock price. That would mean the end of effective FUD and countermarketing against open source.

ivo asks:
A while ago, we read from you that being the Open Source advocate you are was wearing you down and influencing your life very badly. Did you cut down on advocating and did it help? In other words, did you get your life back?

ESR answers:
Not really. Something more remarkable happened instead; the community responded to my distress call by growing up a little. I got letters of apology from some of the worst flamers. Many people in the rest of the community started pressuring the pinheads who had been making my job harder to shut up or get constructive.

I have also cut down somewhat on my travel schedule, but not as much as I thought earlier this year I would have to. I'm also demanding (and getting) better travel conditions -- business class instead of the cheap seats in coach. It makes a difference, more of one than I would have thought.

Stephen Williams asks*:
I'm glad to see that, after a three-year break, the Jargon File has been updated over the past few months. Is version 5.0.0 in the works? Are there any plans to release an update to the print version, The New Hacker's Dictionary, any time soon?

ESR answers:
I've discussed the possibility with people at O'Reilly. That might be my second-to-next book, after "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" and before "The Art Of Unix Programming" (which is about half-done now but could take me another nine months to finish). Whether I go with O'Reilly or the publisher of the previous editions (MIT Press) the fourth edition of TNHD seems likely to come out next year sometime.

Tom Christiansen asks:
I don't know how to ask this question without it sounding like stirring the pot, but what about the growing chasm between free software (giftware) and GNU software (the viral kind, not the nice LGPL kind)? This is a real issue for some people in some situations. Think about the many BSD resellers and vendors who have custom packaging in highly competitive fields, like video editing? Doesn't the friction hurt everyone? Apple has turned to BSD not Linux, and the GPL is cited as one reason why. This seems to be devisive. There are no end of flamewars on /. and elsewhere, and the heat diminishes the light. What kind of reconciliation is possible? Or is "take no prisoners" just the way it has to work?

ESR answers:
I don't see a chasm there, Tom. After all, we're all still writing and exchanging code. We're all using basically the same set of licenses. I don't think there are properly two different movements at all, outside the imaginations of a few rather fanatical partisans on both sides.

Here is the reality test: if you're running a project and someone sends you a patch, will you stop to enquire whether that person is a member of the correct faction before you apply it? I don't think so...

So despite the verbal fireworks and philosophical disputes, we're all hackers together. What unites us is more important than what divides us.

Tet asks:
You say you want to live in a world where software doesn't suck. I couldn't agree more. However, do you see closed source software on an open source OS as a step in the right direction, or just likely to be a more stable platform on which to run your potentially bug-ridden software?

ESR answers:
Step in the right direction, definitely. As more and more infrastructure goes open, and the remaimning closed-source applications increasingly use it for leverage, the overall quality of the applications will go up.

planet_hoth*:
Recent interest shown by large commercial tech companies (IBM, SGI, Sun) seems to signal a new chapter in the history of Linux. Do you see the participation of these companies strengthening the linux communitity? Destroying it? Or transforming it into something completely different?

ESR answers:
Look around you. What do you see, compared to a year ago?

Do you see fewer Linux hackers writing open source, or more? Do you see fewer hackers getting *paid* to write open source, or more? I think the answer is pretty clear.

Do you see our designs, or our licenses, or our coding practices being changed in any significant way by corporate participation? Again, I think the answer is pretty clear.

The truth is, they're not transforming us. We're transforming them.

asad asks*:
I know that you are on the board of directors at VA Linux, what does your job entail?

ESR answers:
My job at VA mostly involves sitting in a board meeting once a month asking searching questions about what the firm is doing and why. My role there (as Larry Augustin describes it) is to be the official corporate conscience. This mainly involves nipping bad ideas in the bud, before they flower into something that would piss off the hacker community. I have not had to do this often.

shawnhargreaves asks:
You've always been involved in hacker projects outside of just coding (eg. the Jargon File), but over the last year or so the spokesperson role seems to have grown into a fulltime job. How long is it since you last sat down to write a major piece of software? Do you expect to go back to fulltime development work anytime soon, and if so, what would you work on? How do you manage to cope with the withdrawal symptoms?

ESR answers:
An astute question ;-). I haven't sat down to write a major piece of software from scratch in months, but I am continuing to maintain fetchmail. I just took over the gif2png beta code with Greg Roelofs's consent; the 1.0.0 version might be out by the time you read this. Today I did some work on gnuplot, bringing the PNG driver up to date.

If I get to go full-time again soon, I want to go back to work on Trove, the distributed web-based code-archiving system I designed last year. I'd also like to work with Guido van Rossum on Python 1.6; there are some long-time wishlist features like rich comparisons and a full lambda facility that I care enough about to implement myself. I also have a strategy-gaming system I wrote back in the 1980s that I'd like to put a modern (Web-based) interface on. Finally, having contributed a bit of code to GNOME (the network-monitor applet) I'd like to balance things by doing something for KDE.

meersan asks:
This has probably been asked before, but I can't recall seeing the answer to it anywhere. What originally led you to write The Cathedral and the Bazaar? -- what I'm interested in is if there was some event or impetus that prompted you to write it down. Obviously you'd have no way of predicting the firestorm that followed, but it's always intriguing to know about the spark that started it all

ESR answers:
I wrote CatB as a way of coping with my astonishment in the face of the Linux phenomenon. What I observed was that the community around Linux had evolved a way to write software that (a) was tremendously effective, (b) violated the classic Brooks's Law rules, and (c) was completely unconscious! Nobody reflected on what they were doing; it was practice without theory. I wrote CatB as an attempt to help my tribe become more conscious about what it has been doing.

Q*bert asks:
We all know that you are a staunch advocate of libertarianism. Do you see the open-source / free-software movement turning into a larger political push for libertarian, minimal government?

What conferences are you planning to attend this year? Do you have plans for organizing Geeks with Guns outings during them? If so, is there a mailing list or some other source of information about how to join?

ESR answers:
No comment on that first question. But, if you could see my face, I'm wearing a very evil grin....

See my speaking calendar for the conferences I plan to attend. As for GWG, there's no mailing list; would you like to host one? I rely on local organizers to find a range, and I don't have one for Atlanta Linux Showcase yet.

banky asks:
Linux, like all things in the computer world, will eventually become obsolete or maybe just too much work to keep "up to date". Linus (er, Dr. Torvalds) even said in his "Open Sources" essay that (paraphrasing) someone else could come along and write something better which will take Linux's place. How long do you think before someone will have an offering that will obsolete (or at least prove a competitor to) Linux and the BSD's?

ESR answers:
I doubt Linux will have a real technical competitor for a long time, because I think it will probably just absorb new architectural ideas, amoeba-like, as they evolve. Twenty years from now the core APIs may have grown and changed tremendously, but we'll still think of it as the `same' codebase and call it Linux :-).

scumdamn asks:
Is the friction between Gnome and KDE, BSD and GPL, Free Software and Open Source, and the other sources of flame war a bad thing or a good thing for the movement? Many people seem to feel that the competition is devisive, but isn't it the opposite? We're always preaching that competition is a good thing for the entire market, but then we complain when any of our pet projects are pitted head to head with another. The passion felt by the proponents of each philosophy seems to result in better, more quality work. Isn't this proof that competition is the Good Thing we've been saying it is all along?

ESR answers:
I think you answered your own question :-).

cemerson asks:
Which of the coders working on open source projects do you admire the most? A particular big name like Linus, or someone less well-known?

ESR answers:
Hmmm. I don't think there's anyone I can say I admire the most. There's a level of ability beyond which trying to make comparisons between people just gets silly, because each of the people that good has become a sort of perfect master of his own domain. Linus. RMS. Larry Wall. Guido van Rossum. James Gosling. Going further back, Ken Thompson or Dennis Ritchie. Anyway, I find these guys have gotten their fill of being admired, so I try to be friends with them instead.

K asks:
Why isn't there an entry for "free software" in the Jargon Dictionary? Was this a politically-motivated decision?

ESR answers:
Zounds! You know, until this moment, I didn't realize that entry was missing.

I don't think you want me to write it, though. I would find it hard to avoid using phrases like "rhetorical millstone around our necks" and "held us back for fifteen years". Care to submit one yourself?

Paul Crowley asks:
In Understand my job, please! you described Bruce Perens's proposal that we have a team of Linux advocates sharing the load as "glib". Could you say more about why you feel this way - isn't it more likely that a job where the load is shared would be more attractive?

ESR answers:
I think I answered that question in the same paragraph you quoted. What makes the job rough isn't the workload, it's the second-guessers and snipers from the sidelines -- among whom Bruce was, at the time, nearly the worst. Connect the dots yourself.

jflynn asks:
Starting an open source project from nothing but people with a common interest is difficult. It's been my experience that it is very easy to founder with a bazaar approach to architecture and design. The issues tend to get confused with religious wars about toolkits and license choice, and just a lot of differing opinions about how to best structure a program, no one of which may be *obviously* better.

Is it essential for individuals to first create a working model, incomplete and buggy it may be, before applying bazaar development? Or what would you suggest in terms of managing a bazaar approach to creating programs from a bare idea?

ESR answers:
I wouldn't. I think you're right; the successful projects have a core of individual vision around which the bazaar community nucleates.

elutfall asks*:
Since, as we all know, cheese is the most powerful substance in the universe, I was wondering what your favorite source of ultimate power is?

ESR answers:
That would have to be sex, because I'm allergic to cheese.

--

Next week: Bruce Sterling.

Doug Muth writes "On Eric Raymond's website, he has just put a graph depicting the growth of Fetchmail over the last few years. It's rather interesting that the number of participants in the project has only grown linearly - not what one would expect from an open source project. Anyone have ideas as to why this less than expected growth might be?"

This week's Slashdot interview subject is Eric S. Raymond. You already know who he is, and may even know that his new book, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, subtitled Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary, will be published by O'Reilly in October. We anticipate lots of questions for Eric. Please try to avoid the obvious ones he's answered thousands of times already, and try to ask only one question per post! We'll forward the selected 10 - 15 questions deemed most interesting by Slashdot moderators and/or editors to him Tuesday afternoon. Answers will appear Friday.

Occasionally someone submits a feature that really raises my eyebrow. Jack William Bell did just that by submitting 'Open Source as an Ant Farm'. Its a really interesting piece that talks about code as art, and much more. Its quite funny, and its got a lot to think about. Click now, you won't regret it. Open Source as an Ant Farm by Jack William Bell

Where Open Source is concerned, hyperbole from the digerteratti hype meisters proliferates nearly as quickly as the hyperlinks they hype. Let's face it -- Clapton has been deposed; Linus Torvalds is now God. And those pundits shouting his divinity the loudest can^Òt even tell a stack register from a walrus. I wonder if Jesus had the same problem?

This constant lionizing of Linus is getting on my nerves. I mean, he is probably a great guy and all (if you know what I mean), but a great man? Usually you wait until people are safely dead (and unable to further embarrass themselves) before heaping those kinds of laurels on their heads. If I was he I would start worrying about that strange human proclivity for taking our living idols down a notch once in a while. Or even nailing them to a tree. Not to mention burning at the stake, drawing and quartering and satirizin g on TV.

But I knew things were getting ridiculous this last week when I saw three different weblogs pointing to the same dumb article using variations on the same dumb caption: 'Open Source as an Art Form' . I mean come on, just because a bunch of nutzoid art types gives Torvalds an award for Linux doesn't mean that an operating system or a development model is art! Yeesh!

Not that I don't think of programming as art mind you. After all I am a programmer myself and I often like to compare what I do to the creation of art. A kind of raw industrial art perpetuated underneath the digital world by Morlo cks like myself while the Eloi cavort on the surface, unaware of the immense complexity (and fragility) of their world. In other words code is art, but it is exclusionist art. No more approachable to the everyday person than a Jackson Pollock work. And twice as incomprehensible!

After all if everyone could do it, it wouldn't be art, would it? It would be just another craft. And if everyone could appreciate good code the way I appreciate the Impressionists then it would be 'Classical' (read 'Dead') Art. Not something alive and thriving. Bubbling and fermenting and making funny smells the way the process of hacking out good code does.

But, you say, it is being appreciated just as you would like! After all, isn't that what the award was all about?

Well, no frankly. Not even close. In my opinion if you can't write good code you can't appreciate good code. At the most you can only appreciate the end result, the compiled program. And, while some programs are definitely 'art' in their own right, many others cannot be described as such based on their even visible-to-the-user external features. And Linux, while a work of art in my programmer eyes, is really just a kernel. A piece of code that, if everything is working right, the user will never see directly. Some of my peers would agree with this. Some will not. As always opinions are all over the map...

One poster on Slashdot tried to have it both ways when he opined "Which part of the programming is the art? Is it the code, neatly formatted, with creative comments and clever algorithms or is it the finished product? When you look at 'art' in a museum, all you see is the finished product . . . So which is the art? The code or the program? I personally think it's the program, and beautiful programs usually have very nice/efficient/clean code."

While another lamented "When the New Yorker compares Open Source to the Algonquin roundtable, the seventh seal will be complete and Microsoft will be free to release Windows 2000."

And another asks "So how is this art going to be displayed? Will art galleries have framed printouts of C code, or will they just give out Linux CDs?"

How indeed? Well, if you read the dumb article I mentioned above you will find the author's thesis is that neither the source code nor the compiled Linux kernel code is the issue, rather the art in question is the Open Source development model that built it! He bases this proposition the following facts:

• China Youth Daily used the Microsoft consternation over Open Source for propaganda purposes.
• The Open Source development model (as described by Eric Raymond) is about cooperation and participation.
• Indian Potlatches were about cooperation and participation.
• The Surrealists did some stuff that involved cooperation and participation.
• A lot of twentieth century art uses 'quotation' (like painting soup cans or sampling 1970's Rock and Roll for Rap music) and 'quotation' is kind of like Open Source, isn't it?
• John Myatt's art forgery scam was kind of like 'quotation' too! And it was kind of like art as well
• When some people share a pseudonym to do wacky performance art, and then someone else uses the same nom de plume to crack a web site or to write an on-line 'tag-team' novel you have cooperation and participation and quotation and propaganda all rolled into one, with an Internet connection as a sweetener!

My first thought on reading the article was "Huh?" Then I reread and listed the salient points above and reiterated "Huh?"

Clearly Harvey Blume isn't a programmer. If he was I wouldn't trust him to code a 'for' loop based on his demonstrated grasp of simple logic. Nonetheless if he had simply stated that Open Source programming with the Bazaar model is 'Art' because he says it was art I would have much less to quibble with. After all art, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Only he didn't. Instead he chose to defend his allegation using arguments that indicate he doesn't understand anything about the subject. In other words, I cannot say Mr. Blume is wrong, but I can state with near certainty that he is the wrong person to make the claim. He might be right, but for the wrong reasons.

So, assuming you can call a development model an art form -- how do you hang it on the wall? I would argue that it is already there. The main point about Open Source is that it is (wait for it) . . . OPEN! Duh^Å Unlike 'Closed' development the source code is available for all to see. And often the discussions between developers are available as well, archived on one list server or another. In the Internet sense you can't get up against the wall any more that that!

But what does the average art lover see hanging there? Open Source as an Art Form? I think not. More like Open Source as an Ant Farm! At most they will get a glimpse of we scurrying workers as we toil underground. But they will never, ever understand. As I said before, I am OK with that.

Non programmer types can present art awards for Linux or even Sendmail if they like, but it doesn't signify to me. In my opinion these awards mean nothing until they are given by someone who understands why the jargon file definition of 'Recursion' is funny. Until then I would rather they just threw money. Wouldn't you?

Occasionally someone submits a feature that really raises my eyebrow. Jack William Bell did just that by submitting 'Open Source as an Ant Farm'. Its a really interesting piece that talks about code as art, and much more. Its quite funny, and its got a lot to think about. Click now, you won't regret it. Open Source as an Ant Farm by Jack William Bell

Where Open Source is concerned, hyperbole from the digerteratti hype meisters proliferates nearly as quickly as the hyperlinks they hype. Let's face it -- Clapton has been deposed; Linus Torvalds is now God. And those pundits shouting his divinity the loudest can^Òt even tell a stack register from a walrus. I wonder if Jesus had the same problem?

This constant lionizing of Linus is getting on my nerves. I mean, he is probably a great guy and all (if you know what I mean), but a great man? Usually you wait until people are safely dead (and unable to further embarrass themselves) before heaping those kinds of laurels on their heads. If I was he I would start worrying about that strange human proclivity for taking our living idols down a notch once in a while. Or even nailing them to a tree. Not to mention burning at the stake, drawing and quartering and satirizin g on TV.

But I knew things were getting ridiculous this last week when I saw three different weblogs pointing to the same dumb article using variations on the same dumb caption: 'Open Source as an Art Form' . I mean come on, just because a bunch of nutzoid art types gives Torvalds an award for Linux doesn't mean that an operating system or a development model is art! Yeesh!

Not that I don't think of programming as art mind you. After all I am a programmer myself and I often like to compare what I do to the creation of art. A kind of raw industrial art perpetuated underneath the digital world by Morlo cks like myself while the Eloi cavort on the surface, unaware of the immense complexity (and fragility) of their world. In other words code is art, but it is exclusionist art. No more approachable to the everyday person than a Jackson Pollock work. And twice as incomprehensible!

After all if everyone could do it, it wouldn't be art, would it? It would be just another craft. And if everyone could appreciate good code the way I appreciate the Impressionists then it would be 'Classical' (read 'Dead') Art. Not something alive and thriving. Bubbling and fermenting and making funny smells the way the process of hacking out good code does.

But, you say, it is being appreciated just as you would like! After all, isn't that what the award was all about?

Well, no frankly. Not even close. In my opinion if you can't write good code you can't appreciate good code. At the most you can only appreciate the end result, the compiled program. And, while some programs are definitely 'art' in their own right, many others cannot be described as such based on their even visible-to-the-user external features. And Linux, while a work of art in my programmer eyes, is really just a kernel. A piece of code that, if everything is working right, the user will never see directly. Some of my peers would agree with this. Some will not. As always opinions are all over the map...

One poster on Slashdot tried to have it both ways when he opined "Which part of the programming is the art? Is it the code, neatly formatted, with creative comments and clever algorithms or is it the finished product? When you look at 'art' in a museum, all you see is the finished product . . . So which is the art? The code or the program? I personally think it's the program, and beautiful programs usually have very nice/efficient/clean code."

While another lamented "When the New Yorker compares Open Source to the Algonquin roundtable, the seventh seal will be complete and Microsoft will be free to release Windows 2000."

And another asks "So how is this art going to be displayed? Will art galleries have framed printouts of C code, or will they just give out Linux CDs?"

How indeed? Well, if you read the dumb article I mentioned above you will find the author's thesis is that neither the source code nor the compiled Linux kernel code is the issue, rather the art in question is the Open Source development model that built it! He bases this proposition the following facts:

• China Youth Daily used the Microsoft consternation over Open Source for propaganda purposes.
• The Open Source development model (as described by Eric Raymond) is about cooperation and participation.
• Indian Potlatches were about cooperation and participation.
• The Surrealists did some stuff that involved cooperation and participation.
• A lot of twentieth century art uses 'quotation' (like painting soup cans or sampling 1970's Rock and Roll for Rap music) and 'quotation' is kind of like Open Source, isn't it?
• John Myatt's art forgery scam was kind of like 'quotation' too! And it was kind of like art as well
• When some people share a pseudonym to do wacky performance art, and then someone else uses the same nom de plume to crack a web site or to write an on-line 'tag-team' novel you have cooperation and participation and quotation and propaganda all rolled into one, with an Internet connection as a sweetener!

My first thought on reading the article was "Huh?" Then I reread and listed the salient points above and reiterated "Huh?"

Clearly Harvey Blume isn't a programmer. If he was I wouldn't trust him to code a 'for' loop based on his demonstrated grasp of simple logic. Nonetheless if he had simply stated that Open Source programming with the Bazaar model is 'Art' because he says it was art I would have much less to quibble with. After all art, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Only he didn't. Instead he chose to defend his allegation using arguments that indicate he doesn't understand anything about the subject. In other words, I cannot say Mr. Blume is wrong, but I can state with near certainty that he is the wrong person to make the claim. He might be right, but for the wrong reasons.

So, assuming you can call a development model an art form -- how do you hang it on the wall? I would argue that it is already there. The main point about Open Source is that it is (wait for it) . . . OPEN! Duh^Å Unlike 'Closed' development the source code is available for all to see. And often the discussions between developers are available as well, archived on one list server or another. In the Internet sense you can't get up against the wall any more that that!

But what does the average art lover see hanging there? Open Source as an Art Form? I think not. More like Open Source as an Ant Farm! At most they will get a glimpse of we scurrying workers as we toil underground. But they will never, ever understand. As I said before, I am OK with that.

Non programmer types can present art awards for Linux or even Sendmail if they like, but it doesn't signify to me. In my opinion these awards mean nothing until they are given by someone who understands why the jargon file definition of 'Recursion' is funny. Until then I would rather they just threw money. Wouldn't you?

ESR has written a piece about the re-unification of the fragmented Unix world, as seen in the growing position of Linux. Click below to get the full read.

In the wake of the wildly successful Red Hat IPO stories mooting the possibility that Linux might `fragment' under corporate pressure seem to be proliferating. The memory of the great proprietary-Unix debacle of the 1980s and early 1990s is constantly invoked -- N different versions diverging as vendors sought to differentiate their products, but succeeded only in balkanizing their market and inviting the Windows invasion.

But amidst all this viewing-with-alarm (some of it genuine, much of it doubtless seeded by Microsoft) something ironically fascinating is happening. Unix is beginning to re-unify itself.

SGI's recent decision to drop IRIX and focus on Linux is one telling straw in the wind. Another is SCO's launch of a Linux professional-services group, clearly a trial balloon aimed at discovering whether SCO's branded-Unix business can be migrated to a Linux codebase. I visited a Hewlett-Packard R&D lab last week, and learned that many people there expect HP to deep-six its HP-UX product in favor of Linux in the fairly near future.

What's causing this phenomenon? Open source, of course. Whoever you are -- SGI, SCO, HP, or even Microsoft -- most of the smart people on the planet work somewhere else. The leverage you get from being able to use all those brains and eyeballs in addition to your own is colossal. It's a competitive advantage traditional operating-systems vendors are finding they can no longer ignore.

Playing along now and trying to defect later won't work either -- because running away from the community with your own little closed Linux fragment would just mean you didn't get to use those brains any more. You'd be swiftly out-evolved and out-competed by the vendors still able to tap the literally hundreds of thousands of open-source developers out there.

What we have now have going is a virtuous circle -- as each of the old-line Unix outfits joins the Linux crowd, the gravity it exerts on the others grows stronger. The Monterey and Tru-64 development efforts, the last-gasp attempts to produce competitive closed Unixes, can't even muster convincing majorities of support inside the vendors backing them; both IBM and Compaq are investing heavily in Linux.

Linux fragmenting? No way. Instead, it's cheerfully absorbing its competition. And the fact that it is `absorbing' rather than `destroying' is key; vendors are belatedly figuring out that the value proposition in the OS business doesn't really depend on code secrecy at all, but instead hinges on smarts and service and features and responsiveness.

These are all things the worldwide community of open-source hackers are really good at supplying. Vendors become packaging and value-add operations that never have to re-invent the wheel again. Customers get better software.

By joining the Linux community, everybody wins.
--
Eric S. Raymond

Eric S. Raymond wrote in to tell us that he has updated The Magic Cauldron (his essay on economics and Open Source) to contain an appendix on common arguments for keeping device drivers closed (Pay attention Creative Labs!) He also says "The argument turns on the fact that drivers are small pieces of code, easy to disassemble if need be. This argument would be considerably strengthened if I could point readers at a working set of tools for disassembling Windows drivers into recompileable source (or even just assembly) code. I would appreciate pointers to any such tools."

Gryphon writes "Eric S. Raymond has posted an interesting response to the RMS response to the Metcalf story. " It's called 'Shut Up and Show Them the Code' and it addresses RMSs comments about differences between the Open Source and the Free Software movement.

Thanks to webmaven for sending us 'The Magic Cauldron', the latest piece by ESR. The paper "anaylzes the evolving economic substrate of the open-source phenomenon." As always, very timely and interesting reading, considering the IPO announcements and more news of investment from folks "oustide" of the Linux world.

ESR sent out the following message to a big old list of folks to clarify the situation regarding the recent announcement that the term 'Open Source' has not officially been registered. Hit the link below to read the whole deal.

The following is an announcement from Eric S. Raymond

On June 15 1999 ZDNet broke the news that OSI's application for an "Open Source" trademark had lapsed, anticipating the public statement OSI had planned to make following its board meeting on 17 June. Subsequently, many people have expressed concern that the phrase "Open Source" might be trademarked by some party hostile to the open-source community.

That's not likely, for the very reason the application was permitted to lapse. We have discovered that there is virtually no chance that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office would register the mark "open source"; the mark is too descriptive. Ironically, we were partly a victim of our own success in bringing the `open source' concept into the mainstream.

So "Open Source" is not and cannot become a trademark. The purposes for which OSI sought a trademark, however, are still valid. We believe the open-source community gains much from the existence of a recognizable brand name -- one which certifies to users that software is being distributed under the licensing model best shown to produce high quality software. We believe that software vendors will seek to use an appropriate certification mark to signify that quality.

For this reason, the Open Source Initiative is announcing a new certification mark, `OSI Certified'. When the Open Source Initiative has approved the license under which a software product is issued, the software's provider is permitted by us to use the OSI Certified certification mark for that open source software. The details will be spelled out on OSI's Web site shortly,

In all such decisions, OSI will seek (as it always has) to advance the interests of the community we serve, and to promote the winning combination of open standards, open source code and independent peer review.

Because the phrase "open source" cannot be trademarked, we must rely on market pressure to protect the concept from abuse. When you see software that claims to be "open source," look for the OSI Certified mark as your assurance of compliance with acceptable licensing standards.

If you don't see the OSI Certified mark, please read the vendor's license for yourself to check that it is in conformance with the Open Source Definition. Please encourage software providers to obtain OSI's certification and to use the OSI Certified mark, and do not purchase software if it claims to be `open source' but does not meet the terms of the Open Source Definition. (Issued by and for OSI, 16 Jun 1999. A copy of this announcement is available on the OSI website at opensource.org.)

-- Eric S. Raymond

knarf writes "

About a week ago I posted a rebuttal to a column by Jack Bryar as published in Andover News to this forum." Click below for the full text from knarf-it's not pretty what happened - and check out the follow-up from Jack Bryar, as a cautionary mea culpa.

[From knarf]

Unfortunately, the original header I included with the message was edited out. In this header I stated that the author of the column had already received a copy of the message. A couple of minutes later someone suggested that people mail my rebuttal to Jack Bryar.

Well, they did, it now seems. And they did many more things. Like send insulting messages, flood his mailbox with repeating messages, and other kindergarten-tricks.

In his current column, Jack Bryar apologizes for the errors he made when writing that column. He also points out the difference between the readers of /. and Linux Today. I originally learned about Jack's first column from Linux Today, as did many others. Like me, some of them took up the issue with the author by correcting his errors and explaining the intricacies of the free software model(s).

Then my article arrived on /.

Hell broke loose. I quote Jack Bryar's current column:

After the "/." posting I got letters that began "hey sh**head go f*** yourself with the money you?re taking from Microsoft! What drugs are you on?" (Way too much coffee, actually). One writer, running out of invective finally sputtered that I was another Jesse Berst! (Somebody should be deeply insulted). After reading these things for a while I became convinced that I could make a fortune distributing a good Linux-compatible spell checker.

Folks, ranting and yelling is not taken as a proof of intelligence by most people. This is supposed to be a forum for "nerds", people with above-average intelligence. Let's make sure we do not spoil the reputation of the free software community by behaving like we just graduated from kindergarten then...

And if in doubt, just query your copy of the Jargon file. Look up the description of `Hacker Speech Style' and draw your own conclusions.

Frank de Lange

knarf writes "

About a week ago I posted a rebuttal to a column by Jack Bryar as published in Andover News to this forum." Click below for the full text from knarf-it's not pretty what happened - and check out the follow-up from Jack Bryar, as a cautionary mea culpa.

[From knarf]

Unfortunately, the original header I included with the message was edited out. In this header I stated that the author of the column had already received a copy of the message. A couple of minutes later someone suggested that people mail my rebuttal to Jack Bryar.

Well, they did, it now seems. And they did many more things. Like send insulting messages, flood his mailbox with repeating messages, and other kindergarten-tricks.

In his current column, Jack Bryar apologizes for the errors he made when writing that column. He also points out the difference between the readers of /. and Linux Today. I originally learned about Jack's first column from Linux Today, as did many others. Like me, some of them took up the issue with the author by correcting his errors and explaining the intricacies of the free software model(s).

Then my article arrived on /.

Hell broke loose. I quote Jack Bryar's current column:

After the "/." posting I got letters that began "hey sh**head go f*** yourself with the money you?re taking from Microsoft! What drugs are you on?" (Way too much coffee, actually). One writer, running out of invective finally sputtered that I was another Jesse Berst! (Somebody should be deeply insulted). After reading these things for a while I became convinced that I could make a fortune distributing a good Linux-compatible spell checker.

Folks, ranting and yelling is not taken as a proof of intelligence by most people. This is supposed to be a forum for "nerds", people with above-average intelligence. Let's make sure we do not spoil the reputation of the free software community by behaving like we just graduated from kindergarten then...

And if in doubt, just query your copy of the Jargon file. Look up the description of `Hacker Speech Style' and draw your own conclusions.

Frank de Lange

Time once again to clean up the submissions bin: First up, Georg C. F. Greve wrote in to tell us that the April issue of Brave GNU Word is up. As always, we have Linux websites popping up left and right: Michael wrote in to point us to LinuxPlanet for newbies, 23D sent us linuxartist.org for the non technical folks, and Popeye wrote in to show us The Linux Lounge for people who I guess want to sit. President John F. Kennedy wrote in to tell us that Propaganda for E is out if you need awesome (and gigantic) tilable background images. Frater 219 wrote in to say that ESR has updated the Jargon File to 4.1.1. Next up, some Slashdot ink: Shag hooked us up with a story about the Slashdot Effect taking down another site, Tomalak brought this Article about Slashdot in InternetWorld (thankfully there is no picture) and cgray wrote in with a link to an article about Jimmy Guterman experiencing the Slashdot Effect- except this one is mostly about the flame. Newton sent us www.ihatestarwars.com for those of you who are sick of the hype. jeth gave us a link to special agent Kimble a Flash Movie. The Wanderer submitted the Dysfunctional Faily Circus in response to last weeks quickie about the Circus reviews in Amazon. An anonyous reader sent us Goumet Ting's page. It looks exactly like my diet.

Stephen Williams writes "After a three-year break, Eric S. Raymond announces that a new version of the Jargon File (4.1.0) has been released. " Lots of new terms. The Slashdot Effect is actually in this time around, but as you old timers know, this is pretty good stuff, and you newbies should consider it required reading.

Stephen Williams writes "After a three-year break, Eric S. Raymond announces that a new version of the Jargon File (4.1.0) has been released. " Lots of new terms. The Slashdot Effect is actually in this time around, but as you old timers know, this is pretty good stuff, and you newbies should consider it required reading.

Jamie writes "ESR tries to clear things up, and suggests a few things for the hacker culture's future. Read it from the mouth of the man. " This puts things more into perspective-and it's good to see things have simmered down a little bit.

hexix writes "ESR wants to retire from his job, and he is looking for someone to take over." Eric says the stress of being away from home, having too little quiet time, and the community's reaction to him is burning him out.

F2F sent us linkage to a bit written by ESR called How to Become a Hacker. The best quote is "being able to break security doesn't make you a hacker more than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer. "

Eric S. Raymond wrote in with his summary of the proceedings from the recent O'Reilly Open Source Summit. Click the link below to read his comments on the proceedings. The following was written by Slashdot Reader, Flautist, and Hacker, Eric S. Raymond

The Open Source Summit report from the anonymous poster using the tag line "You can't handle the truth" got a crucial fact wrong -- and that fact is symbolic of a larger problem with the essay.

It was not, in fact, a guy from HP who flung at me "You've never run a business". It was one of our own; Larry McVoy, a hacker who is a sort of anti-Stallman -- he believes that unless the open-source community accepts direct-revenue-capture licenses we will all come to a horrible end.

The author seems to have filtered his view of the summit through a simplifying myth that regards hackers and businesspeople as poles apart, with all hackers on the "free software" side of the fence and all businessmen either opposed to open source or puzzled by it or out to exploit it in some sinister way.

That simplifying myth has no room in it for Larry McVoy. Nor for the half-dozen or so businesspeople in the room who really seemed to get it. The truth is, I didn't see "hackers vs. suits" at the Summit -- just a whole bunch of people trying in various ways to get a handle on a very powerful and complex phenomenon.

And you know what? Licenses, everybody's favorite subject for doctrinal warfare, *were never even discussed*. They just weren't a big issue. My sense was that everybody there understood the basic hacker-community social contract that the OSD expresses and accepted it -- *even the suits*. All the hot questions were posed at a higher level; so we've got this social contract, we know why it clobbers the hell out of closed-source methods, now what do we do with it?

Mr. "You can't handle the truth" apparently had some trouble assimilating it himself. I saw no evidence that anyone there was incapable of "getting it", and I saw no justification for alarmist fox-in-the-henhouse metaphors.

Some plain truth: businesspeople can't "crush" us because, fundamentally, they can't do *anything* to us except throw money or refrain from throwing money. They can't erase all our source archives. They can't stop tens of thousands of people from writing code every day for reasons that are outside the ken of material-scarcity economics. They can't prevent the open-source community from evolving in any cultural direction it damn well pleases. As well try to cut water with a sword...

The only way I can account for the tone of Mr. YCHTH's essay (or the less sophisticated rantings of J. Random Slashdotter) is by supposing that a lot of hackers have a sort of need to feel persecuted, a need to cast themselves as the little guy in a David vs. Goliath drama with eschatological stakes.

Reality is much more complicated than that. This Goliath (big business) hasn't got the slightest damn interest in persecuting us, he just wants to figure out how our nifty sling works. And it's safe to tell him, too, because big guys are relatively lousy with slings and we'll always be better than he is at it.

We are much more likely to "corrupt" business than it is to "corrupt" us.

Tsu want an answer to the following question: "So who the heck was (is?) Andrew Fluegelman? According to his Jargon File entry, he was one of the founders of the Shareware concept, the writer of PC-Talk, and owner of the trademark on 'Freeware'. But, apparently, he has since dissapeared and is presumed dead. This is an interesting bit of trivia from the Dark Ages of personal computing, and I think it's high time we find out what happened. Conspiracy, anyone?" Hmmm... now I'm intrigued!

ESR writes "I have been in communication with Steve Case, CEO of AOL. Here is an authorized quote from him: "We certainly intend to continue to support Mozilla and the open-source community -- indeed, I hope our involvement will further energize Mozilla.org and rally even more support among developers." Also (in mail to JWZ): "...we share your view that the agenda of Mozilla is and should be set by those who contribute to it. We will contribute too -- in part, by maintaining the autonomy of mozilla.org" Maybe this will mollify some of the AOL-haters out there?"

ESR writes "The Wall Street Journal called me less than an hour ago to quiz me about the Halloween Document.

I gave them the sound bites they were looking for. In the process I found out that they've already talked with Microsoft -- and Microsoft has officially admitted that the memorandum is genuine!

This fact should become public knowledge no later than tomorrow evening (Nov 3) when the WSJ story runs.

As you peruse your WSJ tomorrow, the distant noise you hear will be me -- laughing my butt off at the people who leapt to accuse me of having been hoaxed, or even of perpetrating the hoax myself."

For those that can't wait, news.com is also confirming it. Thanks to David Fred for this link. Update! VNUNet believes Microsoft sanctioned the leak since it gives credibility to Microsoft's claim that Linux is competition for them. Microsoft's UK marketing manager also says Linux is not a threat. This reader's comment points out that the document focusses on License forking, not code forking. Links from LinuxToday.

ESR writes "The Wall Street Journal called me less than an hour ago to quiz me about the Halloween Document.

I gave them the sound bites they were looking for. In the process I found out that they've already talked with Microsoft -- and Microsoft has officially admitted that the memorandum is genuine!

This fact should become public knowledge no later than tomorrow evening (Nov 3) when the WSJ story runs.

As you peruse your WSJ tomorrow, the distant noise you hear will be me -- laughing my butt off at the people who leapt to accuse me of having been hoaxed, or even of perpetrating the hoax myself."

For those that can't wait, news.com is also confirming it. Thanks to David Fred for this link. Update! VNUNet believes Microsoft sanctioned the leak since it gives credibility to Microsoft's claim that Linux is competition for them. Microsoft's UK marketing manager also says Linux is not a threat. This reader's comment points out that the document focusses on License forking, not code forking. Links from LinuxToday.

Found in LWN. Apparently, Microsoft has begun its dissection of the open source community. Eric Raymond has been leaked an internal Microsoft memo regarding open source software. Quite the interesting read. Turns out they even mention Slashdot. This could be beneficial to us in another way, as well: it points out, in no uncertain words, our deficiencies. Consider it the master TODO list, guys. Update!(S) Vorx writes "ZDNet just posted an article about the MS Halloween document. They mention ESR and his role in publicizing it. Seems like more attention is being paid to this article now, maybe some PHB's will start to wonder about MS and Fear :)" Update! (S) David Rysdam wrote to tell us: "I wrote to ESR myself and told him about the brouhaha over here at Slashdot over the "Halloween Paper". I explained that many thought it was a hoax perpetrated on or by him, but that I thought even if he was the hoaxster I didn't believe he'd keep up an outright lie. So I asked him straight: "To the best of your knowledge, is this memo what it purports to be: a leaked, internal, MS communication?" He responded: "Absolutely. I believe it is authentic." So I think we can drop the "ESR is lying" hypothesis." Also, Paul Victor Novarese has mirrored the Halloween Document (with ESR's permission).

ESR writes "Now you can get the scoop on Atlanta Linux Showcase's most controversial and fun event, Geeks With Guns! (Release 1). Our guest demigod this time was Richard M. Stallman; we actually have pictures of him shooting my .45ACP pistol. (Our demigod last time was Linus -- I guess this means I have to recruit Larry Wall for Release 2 at LinuxWorld)."

ESR writes "Now you can get the scoop on Atlanta Linux Showcase's most controversial and fun event, Geeks With Guns! (Release 1). Our guest demigod this time was Richard M. Stallman; we actually have pictures of him shooting my .45ACP pistol. (Our demigod last time was Linus -- I guess this means I have to recruit Larry Wall for Release 2 at LinuxWorld)."

Eric S. Raymond wrote in to seek out some help for maintaining the ever popular Sunsite archives. You can click the link below to read what this will mean. Hopefully there a few kind souls out there that can help keep this important site running smoothly. Update Eric wrote back to say thanks, he's got over 100 responses, plus Red Hat has donated money to hire someone to help keep Sunsite alive. The following was written by Eric S. Raymond

This is a plea for help. I can't maintain Sunsite alone anymore. Counting only active projects, I maintain fetchmail and several key FAQs. I'm supposed to be leading the Trove project. I have two technical manuscript reviews due this month, the next INTERCAL release is waiting on me, and Donald Knuth just sent me an invitation to implement Turingol.

I was pretty heavily loaded and working ten-hour days even before the necessity to do the whole Open Source thing landed on me like a ton of bricks six months ago. Now, on top of my own projects, I'm doing several press contacts a week, maintaining the www.opensource.org site, and spending a significant amount of time as a traveling evangelist (I'm just back from giving the keynote speech at Open Source Developer Day). I've had to shelve several projects I cared about just to keep my head above water.

In fact I'm so busy now that I just had to turn down an invitation to receive an award from the Seybold folks on 31 Aug -- because that weekend I have to speak at MITRE in Washington D.C. and make a start on changing the Pentagon's technology-procurement rules to favor open-source software.

Something had to give, and it's been the hours every week I used to spend on Sunsite. There are more than three hundred packages waiting to be filed there, I'm getting nagging mail from developers, and I can't handle it anymore.

I need at least three or four volunteers to do routine package filing on Sunsite. The job isn't very hard; I wrote a Perl application called `keeper' last year that automates away most of the nasty bits and has plenty of on-line help. It takes steady attention every week, though, to keep the incoming queue from piling up too high.

The other good news is that the job is temporary. One of the things I'm trying to reclaim time to do is the Trove project, which will replace Sunsite's clunky and archaic FTP tree with a Web-accessible database. Once this happens it will drastically cut the amount of maintainer time required. But I can't finish Trove if I'm running as fast as I can just to keep Sunsite maintained.

Please help; please email me at esr@sunsite.unc.org to volunteer. This job parallelizes nicely. If eight people can give it an hour a week, we're golden. If sixteen can give it half an hour a week we'll be just as good. Keeper is not hard to use, and you'll be performing a vital service to the entire Linux and open-source community.

Eric S. Raymond wrote in to seek out some help for maintaining the ever popular Sunsite archives. You can click the link below to read what this will mean. Hopefully there a few kind souls out there that can help keep this important site running smoothly. Update Eric wrote back to say thanks, he's got over 100 responses, plus Red Hat has donated money to hire someone to help keep Sunsite alive. The following was written by Eric S. Raymond

This is a plea for help. I can't maintain Sunsite alone anymore. Counting only active projects, I maintain fetchmail and several key FAQs. I'm supposed to be leading the Trove project. I have two technical manuscript reviews due this month, the next INTERCAL release is waiting on me, and Donald Knuth just sent me an invitation to implement Turingol.

I was pretty heavily loaded and working ten-hour days even before the necessity to do the whole Open Source thing landed on me like a ton of bricks six months ago. Now, on top of my own projects, I'm doing several press contacts a week, maintaining the www.opensource.org site, and spending a significant amount of time as a traveling evangelist (I'm just back from giving the keynote speech at Open Source Developer Day). I've had to shelve several projects I cared about just to keep my head above water.

In fact I'm so busy now that I just had to turn down an invitation to receive an award from the Seybold folks on 31 Aug -- because that weekend I have to speak at MITRE in Washington D.C. and make a start on changing the Pentagon's technology-procurement rules to favor open-source software.

Something had to give, and it's been the hours every week I used to spend on Sunsite. There are more than three hundred packages waiting to be filed there, I'm getting nagging mail from developers, and I can't handle it anymore.

I need at least three or four volunteers to do routine package filing on Sunsite. The job isn't very hard; I wrote a Perl application called `keeper' last year that automates away most of the nasty bits and has plenty of on-line help. It takes steady attention every week, though, to keep the incoming queue from piling up too high.

The other good news is that the job is temporary. One of the things I'm trying to reclaim time to do is the Trove project, which will replace Sunsite's clunky and archaic FTP tree with a Web-accessible database. Once this happens it will drastically cut the amount of maintainer time required. But I can't finish Trove if I'm running as fast as I can just to keep Sunsite maintained.

Please help; please email me at esr@sunsite.unc.org to volunteer. This job parallelizes nicely. If eight people can give it an hour a week, we're golden. If sixteen can give it half an hour a week we'll be just as good. Keeper is not hard to use, and you'll be performing a vital service to the entire Linux and open-source community.

Eric S. Raymond wrote in with a report from the World Sci Fi Convention. He starts off "Question: Where might you go to find a higher density of hackers per square yard than your average computer trade show? Answer: At a science-fiction convention...and I'm reporting live from the biggest of them all, the annual World Science Fiction Convention which happens to be in Baltimore, Maryland this year. " Hit the link to read esr's report. The following is written by Slashdot reader, and all around cool guy, Eric S. Raymond. If you haven't read his stuff, you're missing out.

Earlier today I attended a very entertaining panel on the Y2K problem. I skipped one on two decades of cyberpunk. As I speak, there's another on "InfoWar: High Tech's Role in Military Conflict". Tomorrow I'll probably go see the REBOOT preview.

As you may gather, we're not short of Internet-related content here...and there's plenty of other stuff that would appeal to the slashdot crowd, including panels on subjects like "Quantum Teleportation" and "Great Space Disasters That Almost Happened".

For those of you who (like me) need to check mail at leat three times a day, we have a capacious Internet Lounge featuring thirty-odd ethernetted network computers tied to a T1. It differs from your typical trade-show access point, though, in that the users typically include several people earnestly typing away while dressed in Star Trek, Babylon 5 or generic alien/vampire/dancing-girl costumes...

And ah, yes...the dealer's room, stuffed to bursting with books and exotic weapons and books and fine leatherwork and books and fantasy jewelry and books and videos and books and original cartoon stills and did I mention the books? There's very nice cross-hilted dagger I've got my eye on...

And tonight, the third night of parties. With all the science and Internet gossip you can eat; this is one of the two or three places each year I find I'm most likely to run into people I know from the net face-to-face, and they usually have interesting stories to tell.

Well, I'm off. There's a live-action role-playing game ("Monsters and Blasters") I want to be sure I get into. And I see the guy than runs one of the biggest ISPs on the East Coast over at the next table. And I'm looking forward to the gourmet cheesecake at the Philadephia party tonight.

Perhaps I'll see some of you at the next Worldcon...

Eric S. Raymond wrote in with a report from the World Sci Fi Convention. He starts off "Question: Where might you go to find a higher density of hackers per square yard than your average computer trade show? Answer: At a science-fiction convention...and I'm reporting live from the biggest of them all, the annual World Science Fiction Convention which happens to be in Baltimore, Maryland this year. " Hit the link to read esr's report. The following is written by Slashdot reader, and all around cool guy, Eric S. Raymond. If you haven't read his stuff, you're missing out.

Earlier today I attended a very entertaining panel on the Y2K problem. I skipped one on two decades of cyberpunk. As I speak, there's another on "InfoWar: High Tech's Role in Military Conflict". Tomorrow I'll probably go see the REBOOT preview.

As you may gather, we're not short of Internet-related content here...and there's plenty of other stuff that would appeal to the slashdot crowd, including panels on subjects like "Quantum Teleportation" and "Great Space Disasters That Almost Happened".

For those of you who (like me) need to check mail at leat three times a day, we have a capacious Internet Lounge featuring thirty-odd ethernetted network computers tied to a T1. It differs from your typical trade-show access point, though, in that the users typically include several people earnestly typing away while dressed in Star Trek, Babylon 5 or generic alien/vampire/dancing-girl costumes...

And ah, yes...the dealer's room, stuffed to bursting with books and exotic weapons and books and fine leatherwork and books and fantasy jewelry and books and videos and books and original cartoon stills and did I mention the books? There's very nice cross-hilted dagger I've got my eye on...

And tonight, the third night of parties. With all the science and Internet gossip you can eat; this is one of the two or three places each year I find I'm most likely to run into people I know from the net face-to-face, and they usually have interesting stories to tell.

Well, I'm off. There's a live-action role-playing game ("Monsters and Blasters") I want to be sure I get into. And I see the guy than runs one of the biggest ISPs on the East Coast over at the next table. And I'm looking forward to the gourmet cheesecake at the Philadephia party tonight.

Perhaps I'll see some of you at the next Worldcon...

Mark Hood writes " Eric S. Raymond (where does he get the time to do all this?) has a new project - "an open-source distributed archiving system for use at large software archive sites". Basically it's a web-based catalog, with full details of packages, files etc which ought to make large archives (eg Sunsite) more maintainable. It's a great idea - and apparantly more urgent than I though, as ESR believes Sunsite will become unmaintainable by the end of this year. The Trove Project is currently in the design phase, but it's the sort of thing that benefits everyone, so pitch in if you can help! "

Eric S. Raymond has written a reply to the recent pair of editorials I ran regarding what makes us hack. His concerns is that the previous editorials have oversimplified the situation. Hit the link below to read his response. The following is an editorial by Slashdot Reader Eric S. Raymond

Many messages appearing on Slashdot in the last couple of days have made me wince pretty hard...and consider whether, in fact, I was really wise to try to haul the social dynamics of hackerdom out into the light.

What's bothering me the most is some of the people who have gotten enthusiastic about the analysis I presented in "The Cathedral And The Bazaar" (CatB) and "Homesteading The Noosphere" (HtN), but, in their enthusiasm, are arguing something like a bad parody of it.

I don't use the word "fame" at all in either paper, except once in reporting on Fare Rideau's critique of an early version of HtN. This is not an accident. `Fame' is a vulgar, brassy, and shallow thing when compared to the earned and considered esteem of one's peers. Believe me on this, because I've had quite a bit of both (especially lately) and I know which one feels like a cheap high with a bad hangover and which one is food for the soul.

And so, I think, do most hackers. It oversimplifies my work and (much more importantly) insults the people and culture my work describes to imply that most hackers have some inner fantasy of tickertape parades, talk-show appearances, and hordes of adoring groupies. But that is exactly what the word `fame' connotes -- and the way people have been flinging it around in disagreement and (worse) agreement with me suggests that a lot of them need to think carefully about the difference between `fame' and `peer repute'.

That difference is crucial to understanding our culture. Because `fame' is a mob phenomenon, essentially an emotional response. It's irrational and self-reinforcing. There are people who are famous for being famous. The photographer who took the pictures for my People interview back in 1996 during my pre-CatB first fifteen minutes of fame called them `face people'. Often, there's nothing behind the face.

Peer repute, on the other hand, is a much subtler and solider thing. The earned and considered approbation of one's peers has to come from accomplishment, from productivity. Often those peers are few, and this becomes more true as one becomes more accomplished. Higher levels of it, unlike fame, become progressively harder to earn because one's own standards for who is a fit peer keep rising.

Linus said "I am your God" at Linux Expo on stage and brought down the house. The line was ironic and hilarious precisely because what he has is not `fame', not uncritical adoration, not the masses gazing up at him in awe, but rather a rational peer response to real achievement. He knows that; and he knows that we know it.

I thought most of us did, anyway. The last day or two of Slashdot makes me wonder. So, in case it needs saying again, don't confuse `peer repute' with `fame'. And if you've interpreted CatB and HtN as assertions that `fame' is the only significant motive for hackers, think again.

Reality, as usual, is more subtle and complex than that.

Eric S. Raymond