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Interview: Ask Eric Raymond What You Will

Posted by samzenpus on from the go-ahead-and-ask dept.

Author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar and The Art of Unix Programming, Eric S.Raymond (ESR) has long been an important spokesperson for the open source movement. It's been a while since we talked to the co-founder of the Open Source Initiative so ESR has agreed to give us some of his time and answer your questions. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one question per post.

3 of 126 comments (clear)

  1. In all seriousness... by iluvcapra · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I believe, but cannot prove, that global “AIDS” is a whole cluster of unrelated diseases all of which have been swept under a single rug for essentially political reasons, and that the identification of HIV as the sole pathogen is likely to go down as one of the most colossal blunders in the history of medicine.

    Do you still deny a link between HIV and the disease known as AIDS?

    You picked an extremely bad example there; Turing was atypical in a way that damages your case. If you examine the actual circumstances of Turing’s exposure, you’ll discover that he was remarkably and willfully self-destructive about it. Outed himself, under circumstances where he could easily have covered and (as I read it) the cop was trying to look the other way. Still, I’m not “pro” Turing’s suicide, just refusing to blame anyone else for it. He made his choice and died. End of story.

    Do you still blame Alan Turing for his fate? So have you become a total crackpot since September 11th, or was it something that was always sorta brewing under the surface.

    --
    Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
    1. Re:In all seriousness... by iluvcapra · · Score: 5, Insightful

      We can go on like this for days, by the way.

      In all seriousness, why is this guy still a thing in the Open Source movement? He wrote a few books in the 90s, very good ones, but he's been irrelevant for years and he's a nut. He has nothing to offer.

      --
      Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
  2. systemd by Canek · · Score: 5, Interesting

    As a long time "Unix philosophy" advocate, and in the light of the announced switch to it by Debian, Ubuntu, and basically every other major Linux distribution, what do you think of systemd, and the tight vertical integration it intends to bring as a standard plumbing for (most of) all Linux distributions?