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Open Letter By Eric S. Raymond To Chris Dodd
An anonymous reader writes "ESR, one of the finest engineers behind the open source movement and much of the software we use everyday, writes an open letter to U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd. ESR points out the concerns of 'the actual engineers who built the Internet and keep it running, who write the software you rely on every day of your life in the 21st century' about politicians attempts to lock down our Internet or our tools. A portion of the letter reads: 'I can best introduce you to our concerns by quoting another of our philosopher/elders, John Gilmore. He said: “The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”
To understand that, you have to grasp that “the Internet” isn’t just a network of wires and switches, it’s also a sort of reactive social organism composed of the people who keep those wires humming and those switches clicking. John Gilmore is one of them. I’m another. And there are some things we will not stand having done to our network.'"
I'm sure Mr. Raymond is quite aware that Senator Dodd no longer holds public office. It is still appropriate to refer to public officials by the title of the last office they held; this is common among those who have served in the Senate, as state governors, etc.
Furthermore, Senator Dodd is now the CEO of the MPAA, an organization whose positions on electronic rights is quite well known, and cause for substantial concern.
Lastly, I think it's a good idea to continue to refer to Mr. Dodd as Senator Dodd, since he took an oath to represent the people and the constitution of this nation, and should be reminded of that at every opportunity.
Write failed: Broken pipe
100% correct. Senators, in the United States, retain that title even after they leave office.
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http://www.catb.org/~esr/software.html
The one that appear that he is most involved in with is gpsd a service daemon that allows Linux to connect to GPS devices.
Recently he created reposurgeon that allows deep level and safe editing of the data in source control packages like git and mercurial.
To quote the fetchmail man page:
Most of the code is from Eric S. Raymond .
Why would anyone actually take credit for having written fetchmail? It's a steaming pile...
Go on strike, watch it crumble, I presume.
I'm having WICKED Atlas Shrugged/Fight Club tangential thoughts right now. You take the people who keep this world running for granted, watch what happens when they disappear or fight back....
There are always ways around censorship for the hardcore techies, of course. But it really wouldn't be that hard to censor the internet for 99% of the population if the government really wanted to.
Don't forget that the hardcore techies export their tech, eventually packaged so the 99% can use it. I remember a short lifetime ago how this argument was used against SSL - no end user would ever use it, because it was too complicated for them. Then a few years later about encrypted hard drives. And now we have a non-tech lady who refuses to decrypt her truecrypt drive.
Yes, the engineers will route around the damage. Yes, it will take time to get it propagated to the masses. But it's inevitable, because the masses don't like being restricted more than their peers, and the engineers have the means to help them.
His claim to have written "software you use everyday" is giflib; he stopped maintaining it in 1994, but it's in lots of browsers and browsing devices.
Wasn't James Madison against this, and insisted that senators and presidents should be entitled "Mister", like everybody else, not to create a new nobility that would be against the constitution?
Well one of his more valuable contributions is GPSD which the maritime industry not only uses every day, but hourly. Every time we put to sea the GPS talks to GPSD which in turn drives the chart software that displays our position at the helm. For that code alone I would nominate Raymond for a MacArthur Fellowship.
Uh he also wrote The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which as far as I know was the first article of any sort that could explain how Open Source worked, and why it worked so well. Surely that's got to count for something.
We have a republic. We have voting for representatives and representative, judicial and executive rule. We have a constitution that specifies these things, and instructs the government that each state government must also conform to this structure.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.