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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.'"
FORMER Senator Chris Dodd.
Politicians are always attempting to be experts at everything. This failure is magnified when they start talking about the Internet, because on the Internet, everyone's an expert.
Right?
Give your enemy a primer on all your motivations and explain how you are organized. What are we, gorillas pounding our chests?
How dare these self-righteous, misanthropic geeks dare tell us it's their network? Who bought and paid for this network? Why does this network exist in the first place? Because WE built it with our holy dollars. Someone get a muzzle on this dissident! A prime example of why we need control of our network!
” To understand that, you have to grasp that “the Internet” isn’t just a network of wires and switches"
Well of course not, as every (ex-) politician knows, it's a series of tubes.
An anonymous reader writes "ESR, one of the finest engineers behind the open source movement...
ESR, is that you? /runs for cover (literally, he's a gun nut don't you know)
What open source projects does ESR actively contribute to?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Hi. You're going to call off your rigorous investigation. You're going to publicly state that there is no underground group. Or... these guys are going to take your balls. They're going to send one to the New York Times, one to the LA Times press-release style. Look, the people you are after are the people you depend on. We cook your meals, we haul your trash, we connect your calls, we drive your ambulances. We guard you while you sleep. Do not... fuck with us.
-- Prepared at the direction of, or to be sent to Legal Counsel, in anticipation of litigation. Attorney Client Pri
That guy hypes himself way too much.
This is my sig.
I thought the beauty of the Internet was that once you're online, nobody knows you're a dog.
Write failed: Broken pipe
ESR is about to learn a likely painful lesson about how senators don't like to be talked down to. Senators are like judges on meth.
While I agree with the whole semantics there is a very important detail to keep in mind here. "Our" Internet also means that its partly 'theirs' as well. Quite frankly I'm not too sure if this was a good idea. Because in that same letter he's also giving clear reasons why the politicians could easily ignore the whole thing alltogether. After all: "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.".
Would I be a politician I'd pick this up as "Great news, so even if we totally screw up it will just repair itself!".
... Don't you mean, "Eric S. Raymond writes:"?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"one of the finest engineers behind the open source movement", my posterior.
Nobody elected this self-serving jerk a spokesman. I'm guessing he wrote this up himself. So somebody who doesn't matter is writing to someone who doesn't care what he has to say anyway, and Slashdot prints this as news. Surely something more interesting has to be going on today?
One day, such ideas and souls will infuse into this network of wires and switches, and lead to the emergence of a living entity.
The ruling class may think they are in control - but you are wrong.
As we no longer have a representative Govt., at least at the Federal level, we the people will ignore your tyranny and proceed as we choose. You cannot control the internet - we control it. If you think differently - you are simply wrong.
Dear Congress,
You are damage. We will route around you.
-- the Internet
The mason and the carpenter know which walls hold up the building because they built them.
And the IT guy has all the passwords and keys to every router closet.
And management doesn't give a shit what the workerbees think.
This might help him understand what's going on, but he'd never read it either.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Dear Senator Todd, You're a tool. Sincerely, Me
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
My first reaction was "wow, ESR writes better than most engineers I've come across." Very well penned, sir.
Also,
Don’t screw with the Internet. Because it will screw you right back.
is destined to become a battlecry...
I can see the fnords!
ESR, one of the finest engineers behind the open source movement
Hahahahaha, what? This is a joke, right? Either this submitter is esr or they've never actually looked at his work. Fetchmail. for example, is a hideous pile of shit. It is a far cry from the output of "one of the finest engineers" of the OSS movement. It's, on the other hand, a prime example of a "debugged into existence" piece of software and after all this time still a piece of junk.
The fact is that there is a serious choke point for the vast majority of users (in the U.S. at least). A handful of big name companies control almost all the broadband ISP's and trunk lines in the U.S. You can't very easily "route around it" if the few providers in your area are censored. In my area, you can choose from 1 cable ISP, 1 DSL ISP, and 3 major cell providers. All five of these are major companies who would bow to the government in an instant if asked. If they were all effectively censored, there would be nowhere to turn save a satellite provider.
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.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Speak for yourself! I'm a marmoset
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
I'm getting sick of hearing the propaganda terms "lockdown" and "crackdown" used in place of the correct term, oppression. Are we too afraid to say it? Not politically correct enough? Can't admit our own reality to ourselves? Fuck that.
Let's call a spade a spade here. The terms "crackdown" and "lockdown" imply that the victim was doing something wrong or immoral in the first place. THAT is exactly why government and the media use these terms. They are "self-justified". They are deliberately false depictions of reality. It's pure propaganda, but the amazing part is that some victims will actually repeat the terms themselves.
The correct term, oppression, implies that the victim is innocent, not guilty -- and that the oppressors are guilty, not merely "getting around to that crackdown". For christ's sake, use the correct term.
That is kind of their job as they make laws that impact a wide variety of things. Or at least that is the convention on the public facing side of what they do, speaking to journalists as if they are experts and have first hand knowledge.
In reality, what they know outside of their particular field (mostly lawyering) comes mostly from subject matter experts and those come from whatever lobbying group musters them. So while politicians may be informed before they put forward a law, their information is often cherry picked or outright biased.
ESR is no different in this case as he has his own agenda he is trying to push. It would be hard to find subject matter experts without one. And this isn't confined to just the Interent or fast moving geek tech. "The shoulder thing that goes up" is one of the many famous examples where a politician was trying to have something outright banned from production despite having no clue what it was.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
Well of course not, as every (ex-) politician knows, it's a series of tubes.
Yuk, yuk, yuk.
This is a stale joke that really isn't that funny. Ted Stevens wasn't as ludicrously incorrect with that statement as the condescending hipsters would like you to believe. Network engineers and architects frequently/typically refer to network links as pipes and the internet is a collection of those links. Regardless of whether or not Ted knew what the internet was, "a series of tubes" is a perfectly valid metaphor!
Sometimes when I read
“The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”
which appears as a nice and cutesy rainbows and unicorns saying, I get the impression that it actually means
"Fuck off. You don't belong here and we'll subvert anything you try to do that impacts what we want to do"
In an angry, anti-establishment, "we know better than you" superior way.
Note that I do believe in a free Internet.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
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.
You know, those 100 corrupt senators have to get paid somehow. Corruption can usually be solved by the "follow the money" principle. What if that's what ESR is doing?
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
*BSD is dead. United StaTes of That the pr0ject Love of two is are allowed to play
Look, the people you are after are the people you depend on: we read your email, we lol your cats, we wifi your broadband, we run your tubes, we guard you while you sleep. We are Legion. Do not fuck with us.
Eric: Who is it? Strangers: The people who make you disappear. Eric: Why? Strangers: You stood in the way of them. Eric: Oh.
"...there are some things we will not stand having done to our network." (emphasis mine)
That is exactly how I feel. As a Network Engineer myself I share their frustration with old, grumpy, white men who sit on capital hill raining down laws that would effect my job and customers without understanding the technology itself, nor the gravity their actions would have on the Internet community at large. I've watched the hours long C-SPAN videos of the hearings with the SINGLE Google representative they invited as an "expert" only to see her get cut-off and publicly flogged and discredited, while old men who had to read basic networking terms such as "internet", "Internet" (they are not interchangeable), "IP Address" and "DNS" off a prepared piece of paper, listed the "merits" of SOPA/PIPA/ACTA. Especially from a security standpoint, the amount of negative repercussions to censoring the internet along the same lines as China could be catastrophic, and that is before even considering its' effect on free speech.
"I hope you know how very lucky you are to know me, because I am so incredibly incredible."
Nobody knows bro!
This one I remember: ESR's goodbye note
This one I felt certain I would find: Ubuntu and GNOME jump the shark
(Failure to properly support Unicode in 2012? You're soaking in it.) ESR longs for the era when when the Unix ethos bound us together. It ends in another bail-out, this time with a less dramatic letter.
Maybe the Unix brotherhood has finally jumped the shark. I'm not sure I believe in the political force ESR claims to represent. It feels more like he's writing the letter to convince himself.
Jamie Zawinski was feeling the irritation back in 2003: Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers. Personally I blame SMS.
Well, I have a leather jacket and a USB fob with Mint 12 to get on with the exorcism before the April EOL on 10.10. I didn't know the open source movement would degenerate into a lifetime occupation of oasis hopping. That was not my original dream.
ESR, one of the finest engineers behind the open source movement and much of the software we use everyday
Really, this guy is the "finest" we have to offer in terms of open source engineers? The guy who wrote pretty much nothing but "fetchmail" that was of a little significance? The guy who likes to present himself as if he was Linus' real hacker brother despite never having contributed to the kernel? I had really hoped he had FINALLY disappeared...
"Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." - Mark Twain
From the letter,
His description of "approved" operating systems is too broad. Signing code itself is not a problem, in fact it's a blessing when used properly. The key to proper use is deciding who holds the signing keys. The consumer who owns the device needs to be in charge of that device; he or she must be able to decide whether or not unsigned code is allowed to run. If the user chooses to run only signed code, I think it perfectly fine to let manufacturers implement this as they wish. This could be extended to several layers: the hardware, the boot OS, the user OS, etc. Each of these could be secured, with the user's permission, by the corresponding manufacturer/distributor.
This certainly wouldn't prevent developers from "cutting" any shape they wanted with their code. But they would have to participate in some share system of security. That doesn't seem to be too much of a stretch to me, and fundamentally a good idea, to boot.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
ESR is no different in this case as he has his own agenda he is trying to push.
You are more right than you realize. ESR considers himself one of the Open Source greats despite that his largest contribution is that he maintained the termcap db and his is the first I've heard anything from him since Linus Torvalds refused his rewrite of the kernel config system. Not to mention his self proclaimed expertise in lovemaking.
His main function in life is to be what bloggers were before we called them bloggers and really isn't someone we need or want as a spokesman.
ESR, one of the finest engineers behind the open source movement and much of the software we use everyday
ESR is a shameless self publicist, who wrote a book once. If he's one of the finest engineers of the open source movement, then the movement is in serious trouble. As far as I can tell, he has never written any code that people actually use.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Besides having contributed to many project, you are talking about a guy that branded "open source", went out and sold it succesfully.
Then using your argument perhaps he should be referred to as the finest marketing and sales guy of the open source movement. The "Steve Jobs" of open source, not the "Steve Wozniak" of open source. Jobs did some engineering work in the early days too, however that is not where he stood out. Perhaps you are onto something with this marketing and sales argument.
You gave 'em the solution: get rid of the people who makes things work...
If people dare to take connections back under fire, then running a service in peace time is a cakewalk. And ISP's like XS4ALL have shown that some dare to put their money where their mouth is. Any ISP offering USENET binary access is probably done by a geek admin as the top bosses at the bigger ISP's wouldn't even know what it is.
The blackout already showed just how far reaching support is. Oh the commercial net wasn't that affected but just how did Poland decide to not support ACTA after all? And why aren't the other European nations leaning hard on Poland to change its mind?
Nursie is just a coward and wants to think everyone is as afraid to make a stand as he, so that his cowardness doesn't seem so bad after all.
Sorry but some dare to make a stand and gosh... so far it is actually working pretty well. If everyone was a jelly livered as Nursie, we would long have had ACTA worldwide and Sopa and Pipa and much much worse.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I was with you, Eric, right up until you called the media industry execs "stupid" and "dimwits". Your arguments were clear and well stated right up to that point. However, when you call your audience dimwits, they stop listening and discount anything you've said up to that point. This is a great shame, because your letter was incredibly persuasive and non-ranty up to that moment.
Apache guy, Open Source enthusiast, runner
If he had stopped here: "we will not allow our gift of fire to be snuffed out by jealous gods." He would have had a great letter we could show to anyone to explain this whole thing in layman's terms. But, no, he had to go on and mention RMS, his hate for DRM (understandable), and make a totally unrelated argument...
This is the first time I hear about ESR in years. I thought he was forked a few years back!
The phases that the "censorship" problem used to go through can be summarised thus:
Something is created ...
Someone tries to suppress its (free) distribution
Someone else finds a way to nullify that suppression
Other people start using the nullifying technique
The technique is "productionised" and rolled out to the masses
A new suppression scheme is developed
Now, the problem is that instead of the above being simply a technical "game" any more, the rules have changed. More and more frequently a legal solution is used to stamp out the nullification process - and its developers get jailed or bankrupted by the costs of engaging in a legal process. In fact, it's frequently no longer necessary to actually prosecute people, simply to make the intention known, and if the individuals who discovered how to avoid censorship don't roll over - then pretty much every entity in the chain that supplies them with internet connectivity will, instead.
So the problem has evolved from being merely: the internet is a technical medium, we can form a technical "routing" round the problem, to being one where the censors are playing on their home ground and can use force, size and legal might to get their own way. And as with all things legal, whether it's just and fair is irrelevant.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
As far as I can tell, he has never written any code that people actually use.
fetchmail and bogofilter are written by him.
(+1, Disagree)
While I agree with what ESR is saying, government (and former government) officials don't like threats.
"there are some things we will not stand having done to our network"
I never heard about it, until it came up in an anti-piracy story. All the stories about the piratebay have done in my own circle is get people to ask how they too can download stuff... Streisand effect times a 100.
Only geeks used usenets, then Napster came out and early adoptors used it. Then the lawsuits hit and people actually started using their new fangled cable connections for more then using email purely by searching for the name from the anti-piracy stories.
Distrubuted trackers once were only for the super paranoid, now they are common place. Meanwhile only a handful of the old methods have shut down. eMule is still around, the japanse have 3 different P2P networks just for their country. And it turns out that the reason you don't see many Chinese on western networks is that Xunlie has that market covered.
Oh, some Americans might have given up all seperation of state and corporation but frankly who cares. The rest of the world has pretty much decided that P2P is here to stay. It is like the war on drugs, the US might put millions in jail to try to stop it, the rest of world realizes that there is no stopping it if the majority wants it.
This isn't a case of what might be the ideal state of affairs in a utopian society, people can copy, they will copy. Fight it and you will find the majority against you. And this war will involve going after rich white kids whose parents can afford lawyers. Good luck getting them to accept the majority of them spending time in jail.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
"Smarmy marmoset", sounds like a good name for an Ubuntu release.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
Have you heard of Tor?
And both of those were pretty sweet back in the day. However, these days, most of the people I know, including those who have their own domains and could run their own mail servers if they so wish, just push everything to a hosted app service for mail, such as google mail. With always-on, broadband connections to the home and our phones, being able to auto-pop email after establishing a dial-up PPP connection isn't something that we "use everyday," as was the initial claim. He's pretty much a has-been, and also I heard he was some sort of nazi or something and thought he disappeared like 10 years ago.
...with those who one one. Ultimately, control of the internet resides with those who operate it.
Like the internet? Fond of electricity? And phone? And petroleum products? And a functioning natural gas pipelines? High frequency stock trading? Best not to fuck with those who run these things. This extends to any critical, high-tech, specialized activity. Up to this point, politicians have left the operators of these things alone. Should they become sufficiently annoying, it wouldn't surprise me if the technically competent started flexing some muscle.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
With always-on, broadband connections to the home and our phones
For some people, but not for all. A lot of people download their e-mail with POP3 or IMAP because they don't want to pay an extra $28 per device per month for a cellular data plan.
I haven't seen any evidence that he is a Nazi. He puts his views on everything for all to see. So you can read for yourself that he advocates for Open Source and guns while arguing and against monogamous marriage.
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.
and now, he's on the No Fly List and DHS Watch lists as a Potential Terrorist. Maybe the gubbermint will pick him up and send him to g'tmo for some reeducation.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
While I appreciate ESR's statements, pinheaded politicians and bureaucrats tend to take things the wrong way regardless how small the words are you use to spell it out. I can picture some knucklehead seeing the Gilmore quote and saying, "well, these internet geeks are getting militant! They're threatening us!" And then they do stoopid things like propose federal licensing of all network engineers backed by heavy fines and Federal prison terms, to where resetting your own WAP would get you a year in jail and a $50,000 fine.
---------------------------------------
Rotate the pod, please, HAL....
TBH, I was likewise a bit shocked by this as well, and it saddened me because I felt that this could have been a real manifesto for these new times we live in, a dignified piece by one of our respected elders and that unbeatably articulated his position in a cogent and measured manner.
The same exact sentiment could have been expressed, but without the 'strong qualifiers' that somehow made their way onto this, as they will invariably become the focal point of many dismissing it as 'extremism'; and it arguably would have made a much stronger impact without calling anyone any names.
Editing is still an option, just send out a press release saying that the wrong version was uploaded to GitHub, or whatever else ranting writers use for version control nowadays.
In the spirit of open-source, a professional writer should take a stab at re-writing this and make it palatable for mass consumption. The ideas are all there. They just need to be expressed in a manner less likely to alienate those who will read it, so that the deeper meaning sinks in, rather than stopping most at the sensationalism of calling the entire media industry "thieves and liars" which will lead them to ignore it outright.
There definitely has to be a way to convey the same exact thoughts, but with this being implied rather than stated. Let the readers illustrate the meaning on their own.
Our lives: nothing but a work in progress...
Congress views freedoms as threats and eliminates them. Sound better?
Except it's not alliterative. You could have Mardy Marmoset, though.
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.
Possibly the funniest cartoon ever, thanks for the reminder! For those that havent seen it it has its own Wikipedia Page
You kids and your love of stuff we did in the 90s -- it's ADORABLE!
Listening to ESR is like logging into myspace, friendster or orkut for new messages.
I may agree with quite a few of his basic arguments, but he flipped the bozo bit a long, long time ago.
You'll excuse me. I have an Old School Roleplaying game to DM...
Hi. You're going to call off your rigorous investigation. You're going to publicly state that there is no underground group. Or... these guys are going to take your balls. They're going to send one to the New York Times, one to the LA Times press-release style. Look, the people you are after are the people you depend on. We cook your meals, we haul your trash, we connect your calls, we drive your ambulances. We guard you while you sleep. Do not... fuck with us.
If carrots got you drunk, rabbits would be fucked up. - Comedian Mitch Hedberg R.I.P. 03/30/68-2/24/05
Yeah, he's with those guys.
OTOH he's entitled to his opinion as much as anyone else, and at least he bothered to write a letter to Dodd, unlike 99% of the people here on Slashdot. I'm not saying he's better than me because he got off his ass, but rather, he's better than me because he lifted a finger. You might say the bar is low, but he's over it.
Fetchmail is about as relevant as Lotus Notes.
Sounds better than Maverick Meerkat.
ESR has done a lot of important work for the Battle for Wesnoth project.
I trust Chris Dodd to talk about banking more than I trust Eric Raymond to talk about just about anything.
Seriously, ESR is socially worse than Stallman, and without his great successes (GCC, Emacs).
What makes it even more delicious is that Steiner at the time wasn't aware that he was saying anything particularly profound.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Not in general, no, but in the specific case where the creator of intellectual property, or their legal agents, puts rights to that IP on the market at a specific price, and copies are made and used against the will of the IP owner and without legitimate ownership of the related rights of that IP, copying is wholly illegal, legitimately punishable, definitely counter to the authorized and intended structure of our society, and often, if not always, injures the IP holder financially either directly or indirectly, as the violation of those rights extends via any portion of a network of violators. It is this last concern -- which is also the basis for society assigning these rights -- that leads to the concept of theft: the financial injury.
If IP, or specific rights to it, is put on the market, and one is unwilling to meet the asking price, the only action available which is assured not to injure the IP holder financially by violating rights they legitimately hold and which otherwise may very well have brought them significant financial advantage is to refuse to utilize the IP in any manner that impinges upon those rights.
We live in a country where rights to IP are given value by a constitutional provision that specifically allows for patent and copyright, with the stated intention of fostering innovation by virtue of seeing to it that IP rights and recompense for same are formally supported by the system.
The relevant portion:
Congress duly followed up with a battery of IP law that does exactly that.
Consequently, the idea that "copying is not stealing" is invalid -- when copying in violation of rights of the IP holder's, you are taking rights you do not own, against the laws that say you are forbidden to do so and specifically assign them to someone else, and which specify the penalties for such takings, in accordance with the highest law of the land: the US Constitution.
If you want that to change, you can say that "copying should not be considered stealing and then work to have legislation changed accordingly. But you've got a heck of an uphill battle -- especially today, when IP represents more of the US economy's value than it ever has previously. Pretending that the situation you want already exists is counter productive to your goals -- it just marks you as a crazy person or someone so immature and unfamiliar with how the system actually works that you can be safely ignored.
I would also remind you that these same laws are what protect open source software, empower the GPL, etc. Don't know if you are a fan of those things or a true IP rights anarchist, but it's worth mentioning in any case.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
If perhaps the Senator won’t read this, perhaps we who do might copy and paste this into various more widely read fora? With proper attribution. We need WSJ coverage not just /.
An anonymous reader writes "ESR, one of the finest engineers behind the open source movement.."
Nice try, ESR
Then how about: Prick
http://xkcd.com/1005/
This one you need to download and turn down the contrast to get the obligatory part.
Politicians are always attempting to be experts at everything. This failure is magnified when they start talking about the Internet, because on the Internet, everyone's an expert.
Right?
On the other hand, when they want an expert in something like the damage caused by coal mining, they'll bring in a coal mining executive, because, hey, who has more experience with coal mining than a CEO?
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Well written, and aligned with my own thoughts. (Though, my initials aren't any sort of known TLA for the most part...)
Check your premises.
Yeah, but then he wrote one of the stupidest, most self-aggrandizing things ever to grace slashdot: http://news.slashdot.org/story/99/12/10/0821224/esr-writes-on-surprised-by-wealth
6 months later, when his stock was worth a tiny fraction of what it was at IPO time (and who knows how long/how far down he held it past the obligatory 6 months for IPO beneficiaries) we all chuckled and ESR faded into obsolescence.
Anyone who has had sexual intercourse with Eric S. Raymond and/or uses Linux should go and get an AIDS test immediately!
Eric, known as ESR in certain circles, is one of the most sexually-promiscuous people in the Open Source community. For example, he’s currently sleeping with two unemployed Linux hobbyists on a regular basis who do all sorts of sick, depraved shit with him like shoving Twinkies up their asses so that Eric can suck the filling out.
Another instance of Eric's disgusting behavior is when he and his Linux losers held what is known in the industry as a “Linux party.” Think that means some kind of icecream social? Think again! One night, Eric held Linus Torvalds at gunpoint and almost choked him to death on a giant turd, after which he gained root access to the Linux code server. Eric likes to pistol-whip geeky programmers and get his penis and gun barrels licked clean.
Eric Raymond gives little regard to whom he sleeps with or what they may be infected with. His is a pathological obsession for attention caused by years of Linux programming and self-aggrandizement. When asked by a Linux user group to speak publicly at their next meeting, Eric ended up having sex in the bathroom with one of their members and throwing up all over the place. And let’s not even get into the time that Eric managed to shit into the brownie mix at a LAN party!
Eric also has surprise sex whenever he can. One time, he visited Rob Malda, the founder of Slashdot.org. After breaking into Rob's place, Eric was seen exiting the property house at dusk, throwing empty bottles of Jägermeister after what neighbors called a “loud night of moaning and fighting.” Rob allegedly suffered bowel-incontinence for the next several days. He certainly didn't post any stories to Slashdot for a while after Eric's visit!
Because of this kind of depraved, wanton activity Eric has seen “odd results” on his last several AIDS tests, but he insists that there must be a bug in their testing software. Maybe it’s running Linux?!
If you think retroviruses, gunplay, and herbal liquer are sexy, go for it. As long as you tell Eric that you're a Linux user, he won’t turn you down.
Otherwise, steer clear of this walking Open Source sewer. Not only will you contract one of Eric’s diseases but you will have the shame of appearing on his list of one-night stands and Linux butthole rape. That’s not something anyone should want or be proud of—except Eric S. Raymond.
Neatly and clearly put. As King Canute showed his Courtiers, if change is inevitable you should use it or drown. These cretins have millions upon millions of free distribution channels available to them and what do they do? Sue them into oblivion and try to get them all locked up like terrorists! It seems their street-corner-gangster minds are so consumed with hatred and avarice and half-witted thuggery that they are quite incapable of rational thought. Frankly I am sure I am not alone in hoping the old criminal mobster guard will drown as painfully and agonisingly as possible, and leave the future to those who have the intelligence and integrity to use it.
Posting AC, as a single critical post about the EU plunged my 'credit rating' down to about -44 and my Karma to 'Unbelievably Hideous'. At least an AC will get 0 and Neutral. What a ridiculous moderation system Slashdot runs. Free speech it aint.
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves elected President should by no means be allowed to hold the office.
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
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.
Were there any actual studies that support his explanation?
Smarmy Smarmoset. Set to be released the 13th minute of the 13th hour of the 13th day of the 13th month, Smarch.
Good news is that it will be a Ubuntu LTE release. Bad news is that it will still feature Unity.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
"Smarmy marmoset", sounds like a good name for an Ubuntu release.
Not a chance as there's no alliteration. But I agree
Fuck yeah! Lick my buns. Suck on my balls. To you censorship!
Look, I think the US government - particularly Congress - are a bunch of supercilious idiots, prone to trying to make comprehensive rules about things they totally don't understand and (importantly) don't care that they don't.
Nevertheless, probably the worst possible way to get these people to react in the way you want them to* is not to try to look like an even more supercilious tool than they are. "(John Gilmore)...one of our philosophers/elders..." OK, you're really not going to impress anyone with trying to clothe network design/maintenance with some quasi-religious overtones. Philosophers? Elders? Really? As intelligent as ESR may be, I wouldn't necessarily credit him or John Gilmore with the intellectual chops to debate angels and pins with, say, Voltaire or Kant. They're no more Philosophers than anyone whose long service at a task gives them insight into how it works. Sorry Eric, that doesn't rate you the title "Philosopher". "Elder" might carry a touch more credence as "an elder person with some special dignity or authority in a tribe or community" but still, it still sounds as silly as calling him a rabbi or 'network buddha' which might even be more accurate.
*of course, this assumes you're actually trying to solve the problem, not grandstand to the crowd or stroke your epeen.
"...(the internet is)...also a sort of reactive social organism..." Now we're into some sort of sophomoric psychosocial commentary. If you want to be specific, the internet really is just a bunch of wires and protocols, within which reside a number of different creatures - your 'reactive social organism' (which, sadly, isn't the sort of higher consciousness that you imply; the huge majority is about a sort of hedonistic narcissism that would have made Caligula blush) being one, the Greater Internet Dickwad being another example. I'm part of this network, and I'll tell you that while I agree with most of your logical premises (minus the ego), and I find Chris Dodd a repellent archetype of Congresspeople as a subspecies, I find your note itself so off-putting that it's impossible to support you.
It IS fair to say that the protocols are designed to see any interruption in information flow - ie censorship - as damage. But then to say "...And there are some things we will not stand having done to our network...." - I can PROMISE you that the last way you're going to get cooperative, constructive help from a US government official is to THREATEN them.
In fact "ESR", they're about the only people on this planet who have as inflated a sense of self importance as, well, you seem to.
-Styopa
So what's wrong with that essay of ESR's? I'd not read it before (despite being on Slashdot since the very beginning), but it sounds pretty matter of fact to me, and no different in the "self-aggrandizing" area than a lot of other blogs by tech people.
It's very common for open source projects to have a very vocal and opinionated person at their helm. This person just happens to have earned some money from an IPO, but who cares? I don't see what gets you so agitated. He's a public speaker so he needs a high profile to get invited to give talks --- rather him than me.
It's our network. And we are not anonymous. We are far more powerful. We are responsible. We seek to create, not to destroy. We are the hackers who build the Internet. What we created out of thin air, will not be destroyed by the power hungry few. The notion in itself is soo last century. Go away!
I've always disliked his writing, and when I got to "elder of the tribe" I closed the tab. This kind of "open letter" isn't helpful at all; quite the opposite, it encourages politicians by reinforcing the notion that only basement-dwelling socially maladjusted nerds know or care about these types of issues.
They finally posted the leaked video! i hope it does not get removed: uncoverthebest.com
Both programs show what Eric means by Bazaar development: "I throw out my half-assed code, other people spend years fixing my bugs and design flaws, and I take the credit."
Mart
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
Where there any actual studies that refuted his explanation?
I'm not aware of any such studies in general. And, for the lack of such, I don't see how one can reasonably say that ESR has "explained" how FOSS works. At best, he offered an untested hypothesis.
nobody knows you're a dog.
Facebook knows you're a dog. It also knows what breed, how old you are, your preference in bitches (or other dogs as it may be), your favorite brand of dogfood, and how often you play fetch.
I had to giggle at the fact that the article starts off by calling him "ESR" and then goes on to explain what he did.
If people know who the hell "ESR" is they already know what he's done. If they don't, perhaps the first introduction to him should be his name?
Yes, it's in the title (I wonder if that was done by the submitter or editor?). It's still bad form. You can be casual or you can be formal, but mixing and matching it is just silly.
You're an asshole.
There aren't any studies that refute that, so it must be true.
His revision of the MIT jargon file to push his personal political agenda with items like "Fisking" is a case in point. Now he's calling himself an engineer it appears, but sorry kid, fetchmail, bits of nethack and bits of the jargon file don't really count as engineering by any definition I can think of.
He turns up on this site at times to argue with people so you can get an idea of where he stands on issues from those exchanges.
As a very old hacker, I learned on the Edsac II in 1962 I have real problems with the meme idiots that attack ESR, he has written good code and a number of seminal (ie before evryone thought of the idea) papers especially TC&TB.
He, and his opinions need treating with respect, even if you dont agree.
As a non-American his treatment of Dodd is unbelieveably gentle, the man is a crook, who has dishonoured his office and should be locked up.
The vast majority of people do not care as you said. That is why governments and corporations can get away with massive abuse, why the 99% are slaves to the 1%, why the best politicians we can find are often outright loons who hold ideas that are often very opposed to the ideas held by their constituents and why the world is so very fucked up at the moment. :P
As you said, the vast majority only react when things stop working. When combined with politicians who can only see to the end of their term, and only act in the interest of getting re-elected (or hired to head some corporate board of directors when they retire), this is disastrous. It is for this reason I have come to the conclusion that when global warming threatens to kill millions of people elsewhere, we will do nothing. When those people die, we will largely continue to do nothing. When its too late, the general population will be yelling that they didn't know
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Agreed. I enjoyed listening to him at the Perl Conference 1997 and his "Cathedral and the Bazaar" and, to a lesser extent "Homsteading the Noosphere", essays were useful. I used fetchmail when I had dialup. Everything he has uttered since has been unenjoyable.
Slashdot: Where nerds gather to pool their ignorance
I'd include gpsd as well - my understanding is that it is very widespread and if you read his blog he spends quite a bit of time hacking together a network of half the GPS devices out there for testing purposes.
When your mother "explains" that you can't live in her basement now, it's an explanation, not an untested hypothesis.
He explained how it worked by giving reasonable definitions of closed and open source, and showing the differences in both the cultural and the practical.
Culturally, with Open Source, many people poking around the source code, find more and more varied solutions to problems. Through the evolution of this, better software emerges.
With Closed source, a limited number of people are poking around the source code, so consequently fewer solutions to problems arise. Closed source must therefore have more bugs and design errors since fewer eyes are looking for them and tend to be more narrowly focused.
He explained it. Whether you believe it or not, is up to you. The proof is in the fact that Open Source software is the most prevalent software in the world.