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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."
And here I thought ESR was a level-headed, objective advocate of OSS.
levine
The guy's an egomaniac, both online and off; if he's the maintainer of a project, he's god of the project. Whoever handed that one off to him is to blame, not ESR himself, because it's not like he's gone through some horrible, recent metamorphosis. :)
Linux: Bastardisation of GNU/Linux used by entities that simply don't care about all my hard work.
Who the heck is ESR, and why is he messing with my jargon file!??
You can run but you can't hide, except, apparently, along the Afghan-Pakistani border.
- There lived a man once who was called Gandhi. If you see the Jargon file, he uses Gandhi and Ghandi as if they were interchangeable. Then again, as long as you inventing you own Jargon, what's a spelling here and there?
- What, no gun advocacy yet?
What is wrong with adding phrases from the warbloggers and what is with singling that out as something "bad" (of all places)? Especially since that is an area where he is familiar.
A better objection, or better phrasing, would be the non-admittance of other phrases from other collectives. It sounds so juch more inclusive that way, much less of that pot-kettle business you know.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
When a single person has that much control over the content of what is ostensibly a "living document", these things are bound to occur. I'm glad that he informed me that I'm supposed to reject hard-left political thinking, otherwise I may have embarassed myself in the near future.
ESR's been doing this for years - ever since he took over maintenance of the Jargon File, he's been adding crap definitions that exist only to push his views.
That's why I treasure my original copy of the GLS-edited Hacker's Dictionary...
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.
Just glancing over the site I see that the first entry in the changelog is the Entry called '404' - clicking upon that entry gives you what?
A 404 - page not found error.
I wonder how that'll be represented in the paper version of the book, perhaps listing it in the index as page 2.5?
1 ESR is basically redefining everyone around you to only exist in your own personal universe, where you of course are the most important person alive. Thus 1 ESR is the maximum this unit can ever attain, anything above 1 would mean instant insanity.
With apologies to Douglas Adams.
And remember kids: Never trust a computer you can actually lift.
This is not new. Ever since ESR first took over the dictionary he has been writing it around his own image. I guess he just found some time now to do a worse job and go full out.
A dictionary should not have opinions in it and the lexicon is full of it.
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.
Somebody should fork this project now.
Just in case he does in case of ESR's incapacity...
The Jargon File
Editorial rights and privileges, ownership of the Jargon File Resource Page, and the copyright of "The New Hacker's Dictionary", are to revert to Guy Steele , or with Guy Steele's consent to John Cowan or a third party agreeable to both.
I always did think that the section at the back entitled "A Portrait of J. Random Hacker" read more like "A Portrait of Eric S. Raymond".
-Stephen
..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?
Ruchard Stallman could have changed it and added "GNU/" in front of every word!
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
They gave ESR more free time to waste by not accepting his CML2. Linus, you should measure your decisions more carefully.
sgis ddo ekil t'nod i
I wept when, inexplicably, I could no longer access esr/jargon.
/Const Woe=Me
Now, it is back; the same, yet different. And I weep again.
Such is this "life" thing.
I saw ESR speak a few years ago. It was a pretty small group (~50 people or so), and so the floor was constantly open to questions for him. He was an absolute dickhead. I asked him simply why he didn't include computer security experts in his definition of hacker and he went off on me for 20 minutes. I then countered with a perfectly valid point. To which he countered with a school-boyish sneer, and nothing more.
He is also the most self-centered geek I've encountered. I can remember vividly a few years ago that he published "10 Sex Tips for Geeks" on Valentines day. If you have ever layed eyes on the man, you know that he is the last person you would ever want to be accepting sex tips from.
If we want this open source movement to take off, we need somebody who's a little more socially adept as our spokesperson. Don't even get me started on how outrageous the whole bazaar and geek-gift culture are.
__________________________________________
Take comfort in your ignorance.
Grandmaster Plague
i see what u mean.
Yet Socrates himself is particularly missed.
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed.
Or, rather, "attacking the dictionary".
If the gang at NTK are so wound up about this, there is a simple solution - create a fork of the Jargon File (and maintain it, themselves). Quoting from the introduction:
So ... they have a choice between whining about what ESR has done, or doing something about it, and they chose to whine.
Heh. I guess I'm whining about them whining about ESR. Pot. Kettle. Oopsie.
Chivalry is not dead, it's just frequently misspelt. - M. Langley
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."
The world will end in 5 minutes. Please log out.
I'll do it for free (the first time, anyway)
In other news, Microsoft, creators of the "Open Source is like a virus" theory, have unveiled the "Open source is like drug dealership" theory.
By reading this comment, you immediately waive any and all rights regarding it.
Finally (and not included in the changelogs), Eric has tweaked the Hacker Politics page, from its previous description as "vaguely liberal-moderate" to "moderate-to-neoconservative (hackers too were affected by the collapse of socialism)". Go tell that to the Kuro5hinners, Eric.
Unless he's been holding surveys, the claims made for politics (both past and current) are impossible to verify. My guess is that the original statement reflected the people he associated with, and the current one does as well. (And if he's active in "warblogging", the people he hangs out with are probably conservative) Unless someone puts together a survey and figures out how to administer it to a representative cross section of the community, we won't have enough statistical data to back up any claim.
"Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative" - Miyamoto Musashi
I think that goes for OS's too
Fork.
______
Like any public domain or copyleft project, it doesn't really matter what kind of job the maintainer does with the Jargon File, since alternate versions may be created effortlessly. ESR should be free to do whatever he likes with the thing, even if it's a bit silly. And since ESR isn't bothering anymore to host the definitive version himself, and hasn't for like a year or something, and 90% of the jargon file mirrors found on google are old versions anyway, it isn't like a forking would even be noticed.
I read the article after writing this comment and noticed NTK kind of makes this point themselves, but I think it's worth reiterating. Esp. since no one reads the article around here.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
If they can get him laid, then they should be able to get anyone laid.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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).
About six months ago I looked for copies of the older versions of the Jargon File. That was not as easy as it sounds. I don't know if ESR has been intentionally ridding the internet of the older versions, but I wasn't too happy about how difficult they were to find. If the older versions of the Jargon File completely disappear, then a valuable part of computer history will be lost. In it's place will be the mindless, egotistical rants of someone who thinks the Open Source community revolves around himself.
That's why I treasure my original copy of the GLS-edited Hacker's Dictionary...
ME TOO!
Seriously. I found "The Hacker's Dictionary" in a bookstore in Ketchikan, Alaska, in 1984. Until then, I felt as if I was the only geek in the world. After that, I realized I was the only geek in Alaska, and there was a real world Out There.
If these allegations are true, and ESR is allowing editorial power to overcome the editor's responsibility to accurately reflect hacker culture, then this is a Very Bad Day for our collective family.
I propose a new rule for the editor of the Jargon File: the editor cannot contribute entries, and instead is relegated to the role of researching and selecting entries, and possibly editing them for language and content (rather like TNT does to movies).
However, as others have pointed out, the Jargon File is ESR's baby. If Guy L. Steele trusted him, I guess we have very little to say. The most we could do would be to fork the Jargon File and create a project called "The Hacker's Dictionary," with CVS access, an XML schema, etc.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
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.
Nah, that's just plain old ESR (a bit younger and thinner, though).
I'd say this picture shows more of a metamorphosis. :-)
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
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.
And where was the open/free graphical OS back in 1991? To compete with Windows 3.1 and the Mac? With things like PageMaker and WordPerfect and Excel and so on?
Especially amusing is this:
It always seemed to me that he's describing himself.No, Eric did not coin the term "open source", Brett. He was at the meeting where the term was suggested, but it wasn't him.
The guy has serious issues.
Just the typical issues of someone who's read too much Heinlein. Nothing more.
Nope, it's actually blog pollution:
gandhicon -eric -raymond -esr -"welcome to gandhicon 4": 15 hits
The original source (a blog entry by Doc Searls) involves a conversation between the author and Raymond. So, it looks like there are only two people actively using the term: Doc Searls and ESR.
Unfortunately, Betrand Meyer is probably one of the few people *more* bombastic and annoying than ESR. Really, there is nothing of interest in Meyer's bogus ad hominem attack against ESR. I don't like guns either, but what in the hell does that have to do with software?
And the whole "Tartuffe" attack against RMS was just sickening. Does anyone have any evidence that RMS is *not* sincere? Just because a famous French play showed that some noble-seeming people are hypocrites, doesn't mean that all are hypocrites.
Chrisd
Co-Editor, Open Sources
Open Source Program Manager, Google, Inc.
and
You can keep the personal attacks...I don't buy them because they seem to spring from either long-held grudges or unsubstantiated claims against Eric's character.
What bothers me is the apparent willingness of this community to attack a person that has done a lot to bring us all here in the first place. If you don't like ESR's version of the jargon file, feel free to fork your own, or email ESR with your specific complaints and work it out.
I'm not disappointed that Taco posted this story because it's not a bad idea to question those we consider leaders in this loose society that is the FOSS community...but I'm surprised and a bit disappointed at how quickly we turn into a bunch of sharks willing to devour each other. The tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theory part of my brain thinks that any proprietary-software-funded trolls have certainly earned their money in this thread.
--K.
Sig: Bad people happen. Try to avoid being one of them.
Now if people would just stop saying "It's called cracker, not hacker. Teh jargon file even says so."
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
Some links
8 94 139
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=63272&cid=5
"My little town has a eight little churches"
"heated but friendly arguments over MVPs like Bruce, Eric, and Richard"
http://www.catb.org/~esr/personal.html
"I live in Malvern, Pennsylvania"
http://www.churchangel.com/WEBPA/malvern.htm
Reading the account's comments, it has an "us vs. them" attitude WRT open source, and claims long-time involvement, yet it's a very recent account. Oh, and most damning of all, ESR has a cat.
Revisionist historians might now make the claim that 'The Cathederal and the Bazaar' outlines the open source software creation process but when it was originally written, it was a polemic against the 'Cathederal' method of software development being practiced by the GNU Emacs development team.
"Gandhicon" may not be a word in common use, but it has a lot of nice features. Why should WSR not be able to use his position of influence on hacker vocabulary to expose neologisms he likes?
Take everything he says with a grain of salt. Hell, take everything anyone says with a grain of salt. (Except maybe Linus himself. All hail Linus.)
Raymond says a lot of silly things and a lot of interesting things. Do you think the right way to respond to this is to ask him to shut up? The cost of silly things is small compared to the benefit of interesting things. Raymond easily manages a high enough ratio that it's worth paying attention to him.
mt
At most 13% of all uses references Eric Raymond.
That would be a good point if all uses of words were contained in Google. I mean, really, just sit back and think of how many strange phrases ('tard, pwn, derf, etc.) that NEVER leave verbal speech, IRC channels, and if you're one of those Windows jack-offs (no offense), Battle.net. Would you ever make a webpage with that language? Hell, even "brb", in all its widespread use, has only 216,000 hits, many of which are for labor organizations and the Biometric Research Branch and such. I think I'VE used "brb" more times than that.
Point is, most hacker jargon won't be found in an HTML page, anxiously awaiting Google webcrawlers to find it. The goal of the jargon file is to define words that most likely couldn't be found anywhere else. The whole point of it is that when you hear some arcane word in IRC, and you search google, and you go "I can't find this definition for this damn word!", the jargon file has you covered. At the same time, jargon that is in large webpage use may be a rarity in actual speech. Google just doesn't answer the question.
Someone should tell ESR there are hackers outside of Texas. Neo Conservatism is virtually inexistant in Europe, where the corporate brain washing procedures are much less developped than they are in ESR's trailer park, and have to actually compete with a working education system.
Dev elpizw tipota, dev phoboumai tipota eimai lephteros http://euclidian.org
As a general rule, anyone in the OSS community who is referred to by their 3 initials is likely to be nuts.
He's the maintainer, he has the power, he uses it. Show me the guy who wouldn't put in some of their own stuff and their own views. I would, and so would 99.9% of people.
Here's a new word for you --- "ESRhole"
...or something like that.
..which I hope somebody will do:
ESRhole - one who takes command of something, proclaiming himself God and is no longer subject to criticism.
As for applicable fixes, wget yourself a mirror of v4.2 here
I know, it's still got a bit of ESR in there, but it's free from the latest bugs, and so therefore more easily cleaned...
Fork it! *kerrack* Fork it good!
With the slightly older version, all one needs to do is set up a new tribunal or something to clean it, repost it, and then add to it as a team. Split the power three or five ways-- hold monthly or bimonthly meetings to discuss submissions, and Make It So.
THAT would be a Good Thing.
Barak Michener
For those too busy to read the article summary above, here's a summary summary:
Seriously, if the editors of Slashdot bitching about someone else's editorial bias isn't an example of the pot calling the kettle black, then I have no idea what is.
A few years back at Geekfest in Cambridge (MA), a co-worker of mine observed ESR telling a local newspaper reporter with a straight face that all geeks are libertarians. I don't think that the idea that every single last one of his fellow engineers might not subscribe to every last one of his pet political causes would ever occur to the man.
Raymond has always been an egomaniac blowhard with a self-opinion exceeding his actual worth by several orders of magnitude, and if you don't believe me, just ask any member of the linux kernel mailing list.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
What's an Idiotarian? To my way of interpreting this writing, it's basically anyone ESR or his adherents disgrees with. At first, an idiotarian is anyone who supports terrorists and tyrants, a/k/a the American Left. However, the screed goes on to assail the American Right, who are most often in support of eliminating terrorists and tyrants. So, yeah, anyone who doesn't subscribe to ESR's version of militant libertarianism is an idiotarian.
A lot of people here were really beating up on ESR; I decided to my own checking and decided that the guy is veering dangerously close to Unabomber material. Guns, anarchy, manifestos against both political sides, whatever. Time to get a cabin in the woods and issue forth open-source decrees. Just don't wrap 'em around pipe bombs and everything will be okay.
Actually, breaking copy-protection schemes was 'cracking' and people who did that were called 'crackers'. It never had anything to do with network security until ESR got his grubby little mitts on it. And thankfully that use seems to have died out.
If ESR had any brains he would have picked something not being used alredy, like a translation of the chinese term 'dark guest'. But he didn't.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
We all feel we can do it better than Eric so let's engage in some bikeshedding by picking at minor details and criticizing ad-nauseum.
Eric Raymond has spent considerable time and invested a *lot* of work over the years - and not just on the jargon file but as an advocate of open source and hackerdom generally. For-goodness-sake, he was the main author of Fetchmail, so that makes him a *real* unix hacker who has written *real* working open source code that is on just about every unix/linux box around (unlike some wannabe losers as I suspect most of the anti-ESR posters might be). He wrote "The Cathedral & the Bazaar" which has been described as having persuaded Netscape to open source thier browser and thereby create the mozilla project. How many of us can say that ! I can't, so I wont criticize, even if I don't agree with everything he puts in the file. So those wannabes who feel like they have the stature to criticize... go ahead, flame away. Spend all day and night flaming about what color the bikeshed should be.
If the everybody feels that the hacker lexicon should be a "scholarly work" with only substantiated widespread usage included, set up a forum or mail-list and accept submissions for new words and phrases with proof of actual usage (like links to mailing list entries and boards where the word has actually been used). Measure occurances and if an entry gets enough "critical mass", then submit it to Eric for inclusion. Hey - maybe you can get your sociology doctorate that way. Participate, just don't sit there throwing flames.
... all our catch phrase are belong to ESR ...
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
... for a /. poll. It would by no means be the scientific evidence you're looking for, but it would certainly be interesting thought fodder.
i an?i c?
Where do you see yourself in the Political Spectrum?
NeoConservative?
Paleoconservative?
Liberitar
Traditionally well-established Liberal (hippie)?
Post-Scarcity Gift Cultural?
Redmondcentric?
PaleoNeoCowboyNealist
I have no beef with the entry on GandhiCon, which I thought was witty and deserving of a place.
There are a few entries where the ESR-factor is bothering me, though, with the hacker politics page being the worst.
I love the line "Hackers are far more likely than most non-hackers to either (a) be aggressively apolitical or (b) entertain peculiar or idiosyncratic political ideas and actually try to live by them day-to-day." which rings very true to my ears, and how the geeks (including myself) view politics. (I know people of both category a and b.)
However, that category "b" definitely includes socialistic (esp. anarchistic) views, especially (but not limited to) outside the US. I've met plenty of hackers who hate all lefties and I've met plenty who see themselves as socialist. The phrase "affected by the collapse of socialism" just sounds like what I read in plenty of rightwing-oriented literature (I like to read stuff from both sides of the camp), but it seems false. The latest years I've seen a great strengthening in various leftlibertarian/anarchist movements. The only thing that's crumbling with the Berlin wall is leninism (and part of marxism), not the socialistic ideals themselves.
Tonight, being in a good mood since it's a nice summer night here, I feel like suggesting that hackers should view each other with kindness regardness of immediate political view. Most hackers have a fondness for freedom, and even though some of us think that corporatism and capitalism are the greatest contemporary threat to that freedom while others think that capitalism is the best means to reach and uphold a state of freedom, the entry in the jargon file should reflect that hackerdom is not a homogenous political movement.
The article makes a specific claim about ESR's recent changes to the Jargon file, a document that he himself maintains, and I will comment on those claims and attempt to explain why I do not believe the claim has merit with respect to the "indications" (evidence) the article suggests.
It claims he added terms he dreamed up that no-one else seems to use as evidenced by search engine use and cited as examples: "Aunt Tillie", "GhandiCon".
He added terms from the warblogging community where he is active.
He aligned the Hacker Politics page to his own views.
Firstly The article links to a site that begins with: "*the* weekly high-tech sarcastic update for the uk>" This should start the warning bell, "The text is probably intended to be humor"
As to the particular instances, individually:
[1] Is perhaps true, that is if ESR goes by many aliases, as there seem to be multiple people using these terms, however:
[2] I expect it to be true that he writes definitions mostly for words he is the most familiar with. This doesn't mean he's rewriting The Jargon File in his own image: it means that he is expanding it to include terms that he knows about and is likely to use, he is not entering junk bytes, he's entering informed bytes.
I for one expect that he would focus on writing the terms that he is most familiar with and hoping that others will take the effort to contribute defintions for terms that they are more familiar with and feel are jargon, so he doesn't end up writing definitions for jargon used by groups he's less involved with. Definitions that could turn out to be less informative or less accurate.
Moreover, adding definitions is not rewriting anything, let alone The Jargon File in his own image, but adding to it, i.e.: making it more useful, and this is a good thing.
If some extra words are added to the Jargon File that suit ESR, then no loss, many only notice the jargon defintions for words they see or use anyhow. (In any event, a small price to pay to have the Jargon File, nobody else is maintaining it.)
I don't believe adding a word or two that is jargon within the warblogging groups to the Jargon File is a thing that has anything to do with ESR's personal image; although, it is a fact and an expected one that the personal experience of any author will effect what they write about.
[3] I recall a mention of Kuro5hin with regard to the fall of
Thats it kids, work it out of your system. He was there from the beggining, dealing with a healthy portion of what defines us and you were not. I know It's killing you. Is it his ego thats hurting or yours? Whos making the rabid attacks, him or you?. I love it when people trash the mountain that was built before their time. Of course if you've given more (or even a fraction more) for our community feel free to tell me off, otherwise don't even bother pressing "reply". Why do you go visit his website if it pisses you off? Does he owe you something? Have you paid him for a service that he is not giving you?
If you outlaw the law, only criminals will have laws
ESR has many less than pleasent characteristics. But he does get out and do stuff that others don't.
If you don't like what he puts in the hackers dictionary then contribute the stuff _you_ see in everyday use. If ESR doesn't accept it then fork a version.
Remember dictionaries don't contain stuff that is immutable, they contain current usage. Meanings and usage change with time, live with it.