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ESR Responds to Nikolai Bezroukov
Cycon writes "ESR has posted his response to Nikolai Bezroukov's criticism of The Cathedral and the Bazaar posted earlier today. ESR states that he 'welcomes such criticism' but that Nikolai 'adds almost nothing useful to the debate.'"
"While I have made a point of not gratuitously waving my politics around in my papers, it is no secret in the open-source world that I am a libertarian, a friend of the free market, and implacably hostile to all forms of Marxism and socialism (which I regard as coequal in evil with Naziism)."
Pretty contradictory to me. And I think ESR should definitely get out of his little hole and check what Marxism and socialism really are. He is deeply confused with the Stalinist application of Communism. All in all, this vision is very american, on the redneck side.
Short reminder: almost all of the European Union countries are led by socialists. Okay, it's now called "social-democracy", but we *never* experienced any Stalinist methods from our governments (the opposite, mostly).
Once again, I'm really disappointed by ESR's comments (mostly FUD nowadays), and the fact this guy is seen as THE OSS "leader". I find this guy dangerous. He mixes strong political opinions (which, you've guessed, I don't share) with some actual achievements (OSS, Linux...). So far, OSS and Linux have been developped in a very socialist way (not communist), in the most noble sense of the word. And it works. IMO, ESR is just trying to appropriate this movement to serve his own political views and interrests.
He calls himself a libertarian, but openly promotes the idea of World Domination(TM), which is what we're fighting through OSS. We all want to have the choice, and the freedom to choose. I don't think World Domination(TM) goes into that direction. ESR also had pretty stupid comments regarding BeOS, claiming it was doomed since it's not Open Source, and basically foreseeing the doom of all closed source OSes and apps.
Thank you Mr Raymond, but keep preaching your nonsense somewhere else. The "go my way or be doomed" smells like the naziism you think you're against and you give me nausea.
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
We have in this thread a huge number of people either failing or refusing to address the point.
Raymond's objection was that Bezroukov's essay went out of its way to caricature and misrepresent his writings. He cited particulars where this was obviously the case. The second-level comments here, ironically, ignore the point even more than Bezroukov's did.
People: The question was whether Bezroukov's comments were relevant and reasonable. Your views on Raymond's politics, his ego, his essays, his pronouncements on the term "GNU/Linux", his skills at diplomacy or lack thereof, his abilities as a "leader", or alleged unwillingness to admit himself wrong, and sundry personal qualities have nothing whatsoever to do with the question at hand.
One or two posters made the almost-relevant remark that Raymond relies on works other than "TCatB" to make most of his points. That might have been a valid objection, except that Bezroukov's essay concerned those other works, too. I quote (emphasis added): "Starting with his famous paper "Cathedral and Bazaar" Eric Raymond published a series of articles (see especially his comments on the so-called Halloween documents) he promoted an overoptimistic and simplistic view of open source, as a variant of socialist (or, to be more exact, vulgar Marxist) interpretation of software development."
Bezroukov addressed this remark explicitly to Raymond's entire body of essays on open source. It is explicitly stated up-top as the thesis of his paper.
Critical commentary should be evaluated for accuracy and relevance on its internal merits. That is the proper standard for everything, there: Bezroukov's piece, Raymond's reply, and you people's alleged commentary on Raymond's reply. The commentary here has been consistently off in Cloud-Cuckooland -- which explains in part how you could possibly fail to notice that Bezroukov wrote nothing better than an extended straw-man argument.
You can do better, people. At least I bloody well hope so.