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ESR Recasts Jargon File in Own Image
don.g writes "As reported by NTK, ESR appears to have embarked apon the process of recasting the Jargon File in his own image, adding terms like "Aunt Tillie" and "GhandiCon" that he dreamt up and seemingly no-one else uses, and various terms from (of all places) the warblogging community, where he is active. He's also updated the "Hacker Politics" page to be more closely aligned with his own views."
Nobody handed this off to ESR. He took it upon himself. Back when he first started to overhaul the Hacker's Dictionary, many of the original contributors were less than pleased with the treatment he was giving it. There were many flamefests in alt.folklore.computers, I believe. Some of the original complaints were that he was adding entries that weren't in common usage, that he deleted entries that he didn't personally like, and that the general tone of some sections was too self-serving. Some things never change.
ESR is Eric S. Raymond, author of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", the essay which was cited as a prime reason for Netscape's decision to release their browser source, and many other essays on Open Source. He was a co-founder of the OSI, and is the long-time maintainer of .
His website is here.
Of course, a google search would have told you all of this.
Once again, it's Gandhi, not Ghandi.
Also, while the changelog spells it correctly, the link there again points to the "Ghandi" spelling. This is the correct link.
And for the curious and lazy, this is the corresponding entry:
GandhiCon
There is a quote from Mohandas Gandhi, describing the stages of establishment resistence to a winning strategy of nonviolent activism, that partisans of open source and especially Linux have embraced as almost an explanatory framework for the behaviors they observe while trying to get corporations and other large institutions to take new ways of doing things seriously:
First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.
In hacker usage this quote has miscegenated with the U.S military's DefCon terminology describing âdefense conditionsâ(TM) or degrees of war alert. At GhandiCon One, you're being ignored. At GhandiCon Two, opponents are laughing at you and dismissing the idea that you could ever be a threat. At GhandiCon Three, they're fighting you on the merits and/or attempting to discredit you. At GhandiCon Four, you're winning and they are arguing to save face or stave off complete collapse of their position.
..it's ESR.
This piece at NTK sounds like flamebait. For the following reasons.
1) They claim he's added terms to the jargon file that... "on closer search-engine examination, appear to have been used almost exclusively by Raymond himself."
The concept that a term that is (by the very context of it's entry) "jargon" would have to have any search engine presence seems like a very bad assumption. Though it's not a common part of net-speech, I'd had the word "Fucktard" taunted at me in Half-Life TFC games long before I'd read it in anything a search engine could reference. The fact that one of the hacker communities most literate advocates would have the majority of hits for a new bit of jargon sounds more like probability mechanics at work than any sinister plot by ESR to reshape the vocabulary of the Internet.
2) They take issue with his update of the "politics" section. It's 77 words long, and seems like as good a summary as one could come up with. http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/politics.html
3) I've put together documents like his rebuttal to the SCO mess, and they are an nightmare of fact checking and redesign. When someone makes claims as preposterous as SCO did regarding Linux it's hard to know where to start. It's even harder to know how much background is needed to explain your points to non-unixphiles. I read the whole document and it was a work of art. It was clear, it had links to piles of substantiating data, I'd be surprised if the IBM legal team didn't throw a party when they first read it.
Did anyone pay ESR for this massive effort?
Does anyone else find it thoughtless and ungrateful to criticize one of the communities greatest single person assets because the tremendous efforts he puts forth FOR FREE are colored by his personal experiences?
the Hackers Dictionary was WRITTEN by ESR around 1990 if memory serves
This entry in Wikipedia says "The Jargon File (hereafter referred to as `jargon-1' or `the File') was begun by Raphael Finkel at Stanford in 1975."
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though ESR significantly enhanced the whole effort during the mid-80's and published as a book.
Actually, according to the Jargon file itself, it was GLS who did the editing for the first book: (see here).
Meyer criticizes the self-assumed ethical superiority of ESR, RMS, and others, and in particular notes the "gun evangelism" ESR intertwines with his open-source evangelism.
This thoughtful article should be required reading for all overly-strident geeks.
Where does Raymond get off claiming authority over the "Hacker's Dictionary". He's not even mentioned in the original edition. The real "Hacker's Dictionary", of course, comes from the MIT AI Lab, and the MIT Jargon File. The original book publication was in 1983 (Steele, Guy. New York, Harper & Row, ISBN 0-06-091082-8). That's the Hacker's Dictionary. Everything else is popular trash by people who weren't there.
The pre-Raymond version of the Jargon File - the Hacker's Dictionary - is available here:
The Original Hacker's Dictionary.
This is more a historical work than anything else, as it documents the language of what Levy calls the "first generation hackers", the ones who worked in the AI labs at Stanford and MIT. Those communities died during in the 80s (which was, of course, the event that provided the impetus for the GNU project.) The Hacker's Dictionary has a genuine and honest flavor that the modern Jargon File lacks, which is probably inevitable, since the Jargon File covers the modern internet-based "hacker" community - a vaguely-defined entity that has even become confused over the meaning of the word "hacker". It's therefore not surprising that ESR feels he can get away with sprinkling the Jargon File with Raymondisms.
ESR is the most egotistic person I've ever met in my life. During his talk at a local LUG, he kept on implying that he started not only the Open Source revolution, but had a hand in Linux, GPL, and creating the Internet. RMS is also pretty egotistical, and truthfully, downright *weird*, but he has a legitimate claim to the Free (as in speech) revolution. Maddog is downright humble. So were the MySQL creators, Apache developers, and folks like Robert Love. It's ESR's constant self-promotion that really makes me think of him as some vain actor.
Yes, there's a lot of politics involved. But I think it was his rampant egotism that sunk his kernel config patches more than technical merit. Seriously, my guess is that no one wanted to fan his flames and give him something to boast about. "Yes, the kernel is OK, but it's the configuration utility that really made it work for the enterprise. Oh, I did that. Nyah nyah nyah."