4 ms·

There are lots of interesting observations and historical tidbits in ESR's writing, but it needs to be taken with a sizable grain of salt for it to not do more

by mwfunk 10y ago

There are lots of interesting observations and historical tidbits in ESR's writing, but it needs to be taken with a sizable grain of salt for it to not do more harm than good. He presents himself like a social scientist finding hidden truths by connecting dots that no one has thought to connect before, and I'm pretty sure that's what he thinks he's doing, but the core of what he does is come up with narratives, try to find facts to support those narratives, and selectively ignore facts that don't support those narratives. He clearly prioritizes narratives over analysis, with heroes and villains and truth and lies and good and evil and grand forces of history shaping the world in ways only he can perceive. If he was really serious about being a software historian, he would spent a lot less time in "I'm just telling you like it is, I've got a bibliography with citations and everything" mode, and a lot more time actively looking for evidence that refutes his claims in the interest of evolving his views. He would also use phrases like "us" and "them" and "elders of our tribe" and "I'm your worst nightmare" and "do you even know who I am?!?" a lot less often (like, never). Once I noticed that he was basically writing a story in which he was his own Mary Sue [1], I could never unsee it. :( That sucked because I really did enjoy and learn from reading his stuff during the peak-ESR years of the mid-to-late-'90s. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Sue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Sue

coldtea 10y ago
It gets worse: (...) Desperate for something to feed my jones, I snaffled my other sister's abandoned flute. And wow! I was a natural...immediately better with it than with the guitar I'd been hacking at for months. I was commuting to college at the time, and took it with me. I'd play as I walked between classes. Six weeks from a cold standing start I sat in with a professional jazz band for the first time...and they liked it. This was delightful but mystifying. All I'd had to do was learn to play a scale, and this amazing river of music poured forth with barely an effort on my part. It seemed almost as though my hands and lips had always known what to do, had been waiting for me to pick up the flute. (...) Until I realized, finally, belatedly, what had been happening to me. Until the Great God Pan reached out of my hindbrain and thundered "YOU!" And his gift is music and his chosen instruments the pipes and flutes. And his, too the power of joy; magic so strong that when it flowed out of me, even before I knew what I was doing, it amazed people into awe and incoherence and poetry. [1] And worse: http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/sextips/bedplay.html http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/sextips/bedplay.html [1] Strong vibes of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CYF9Ge2JL0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CYF9Ge2JL0
- microcolonel 10y ago
  What's wrong with bedplay.html?
  - coldtea 10y ago
    The idea that ESR considers himself also capable of writing a sexual advice manual...
    - lookACamel 10y ago
      https://www.flickr.com/photos/pkdouyk/241484893 https://www.flickr.com/photos/pkdouyk/241484893
- hinkley 10y ago
  It's not like Richard Stallman is a paragon of mental health. That leaves Linus Torvalds. I am so whelmed I can't stand it.
  - tptacek 10y ago
    Richard Stallman isn't an analyst or a historian. He's an activist, and from all available evidence a remarkably genuine and focused activist. I don't agree with a lot of what RMS believes (for instance: I'm just fine with DRM), but I respect him. The same isn't true of Eric Raymond.
pcwalton 10y ago
Right. And there's a big problem with "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" itself: it focuses on fetchmail, which is a relatively obscure (compared to e.g. Linux) piece of software that became remarkably cathedral-like in its development after ESR took over, to the detriment of its users. (By "detriment" I'm referring to both design errors and numerous memory safety flaws resulting in remote code execution [1].) [1]: http://pyropus.ca/software/getmail/faq.html#faq-about-why http://pyropus.ca/software/getmail/faq.html#faq-about-why
davidw 10y ago
ESR's writings taken as a whole do have their issues, as pointed out by others. CATB was a good bit of writing though, that pointed out the benefits of open source software to a lot of people.
- tptacek 10y ago
  It's effective writing, but is it "good"? Large chunks of it have been discredited. For instance, "many eyes make all bugs shallow" has been a running joke in the software security field for over a decade.
  - davidw 10y ago
    Yeah, I think it was pretty good. I still don't think anyone has a perfect explanation of open source economics and business yet, so for the time, especially, it was good. Large chunks of the security field seem to love nothing better than to have something to sneer at, but there's a grain of truth in that phrase too. Remember when that Rails vulnerability came out a while back? It was like blood in the water for the sharks, and a lot of people started looking for more. Critically, yes, they were also the right people to be looking at it, but the influx of people looking brought to light other things, making the whole system more secure.
    - tptacek 10y ago
      Raymond helpfully broke the essay up into numbered observations. Try the exercise of going through them and counting: * Which are shoplifted directly from Brooks or from the early Unix designers (Kernighan and Pike in particular). * Which are banal results of simply reporting the zeitgeist he was writing in, or, worse, blinkered by a lack of insight into how large-scale closed-source commercial development was already working at the time. * Which have not been borne out at all; for instance, many eyes making all bugs shallow. * Which are really sneaky attempts to associate his minor work on fetchmail --- that "abomination before God" --- with major work like Linux. I don't think the essay holds up. It is effectively written. Raymond is a capable verbal communicator. He can write a coherent sentence. But that's an awfully low bar to clear. In its substance, I think the essay is in fact "not good". Regarding "Linus's law", you have to do better than observe that random users will find bugs in software and have done so repeatedly for open source software. You have to account for two additional details that Raymond is in no hurry to talk about: 1. The major vulnerabilities in open source software that were hidden in plain sight for years and years and only discovered by commercial security labs. 2. The effectiveness with which the same group of securing security nerds has shaken bugs out of closed source software, most notably that of Microsoft, Raymond's bete noir.
tatterdemalion 10y ago
I completely agree that Eric Raymond's writing is mostly spurious (and often offensive), but I want to step in for history as a discipline here. Narrative is a valid historiographic technique, and you don't have to perform social scientific tactics to be serious about being an historian. There are social scientific historians, but history is classified as a humanity for a reason. What's problematic is presenting narrative history as if it were scientific, and also bad narrative history which diminishes rather than elevating the discourse around these events (which Eric Raymond's "great man history of computing [ps I'm the great man]" certainly does).

by mwfunk 10y ago

coldtea 10y ago

It gets worse: (...) Desperate for something to feed my jones, I snaffled my other sister's abandoned flute. And wow! I was a natural...immediately better with it than with the guitar I'd been hacking at for months. I was commuting to college at the time, and took it with me. I'd play as I walked between classes. Six weeks from a cold standing start I sat in with a professional jazz band for the first time...and they liked it. This was delightful but mystifying. All I'd had to do was learn to play a scale, and this amazing river of music poured forth with barely an effort on my part. It seemed almost as though my hands and lips had always known what to do, had been waiting for me to pick up the flute. (...) Until I realized, finally, belatedly, what had been happening to me. Until the Great God Pan reached out of my hindbrain and thundered "YOU!" And his gift is music and his chosen instruments the pipes and flutes. And his, too the power of joy; magic so strong that when it flowed out of me, even before I knew what I was doing, it amazed people into awe and incoherence and poetry. [1] And worse: http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/sextips/bedplay.html http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/sextips/bedplay.html [1] Strong vibes of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CYF9Ge2JL0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CYF9Ge2JL0

microcolonel 10y ago
What's wrong with bedplay.html?
- coldtea 10y ago
  The idea that ESR considers himself also capable of writing a sexual advice manual...
  - lookACamel 10y ago
    https://www.flickr.com/photos/pkdouyk/241484893 https://www.flickr.com/photos/pkdouyk/241484893
hinkley 10y ago
It's not like Richard Stallman is a paragon of mental health. That leaves Linus Torvalds. I am so whelmed I can't stand it.
- tptacek 10y ago
  Richard Stallman isn't an analyst or a historian. He's an activist, and from all available evidence a remarkably genuine and focused activist. I don't agree with a lot of what RMS believes (for instance: I'm just fine with DRM), but I respect him. The same isn't true of Eric Raymond.

pcwalton 10y ago

Right. And there's a big problem with "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" itself: it focuses on fetchmail, which is a relatively obscure (compared to e.g. Linux) piece of software that became remarkably cathedral-like in its development after ESR took over, to the detriment of its users. (By "detriment" I'm referring to both design errors and numerous memory safety flaws resulting in remote code execution [1].) [1]: http://pyropus.ca/software/getmail/faq.html#faq-about-why http://pyropus.ca/software/getmail/faq.html#faq-about-why

davidw 10y ago

ESR's writings taken as a whole do have their issues, as pointed out by others. CATB was a good bit of writing though, that pointed out the benefits of open source software to a lot of people.

tptacek 10y ago
It's effective writing, but is it "good"? Large chunks of it have been discredited. For instance, "many eyes make all bugs shallow" has been a running joke in the software security field for over a decade.
- davidw 10y ago
  Yeah, I think it was pretty good. I still don't think anyone has a perfect explanation of open source economics and business yet, so for the time, especially, it was good. Large chunks of the security field seem to love nothing better than to have something to sneer at, but there's a grain of truth in that phrase too. Remember when that Rails vulnerability came out a while back? It was like blood in the water for the sharks, and a lot of people started looking for more. Critically, yes, they were also the right people to be looking at it, but the influx of people looking brought to light other things, making the whole system more secure.
  - tptacek 10y ago
    Raymond helpfully broke the essay up into numbered observations. Try the exercise of going through them and counting: * Which are shoplifted directly from Brooks or from the early Unix designers (Kernighan and Pike in particular). * Which are banal results of simply reporting the zeitgeist he was writing in, or, worse, blinkered by a lack of insight into how large-scale closed-source commercial development was already working at the time. * Which have not been borne out at all; for instance, many eyes making all bugs shallow. * Which are really sneaky attempts to associate his minor work on fetchmail --- that "abomination before God" --- with major work like Linux. I don't think the essay holds up. It is effectively written. Raymond is a capable verbal communicator. He can write a coherent sentence. But that's an awfully low bar to clear. In its substance, I think the essay is in fact "not good". Regarding "Linus's law", you have to do better than observe that random users will find bugs in software and have done so repeatedly for open source software. You have to account for two additional details that Raymond is in no hurry to talk about: 1. The major vulnerabilities in open source software that were hidden in plain sight for years and years and only discovered by commercial security labs. 2. The effectiveness with which the same group of securing security nerds has shaken bugs out of closed source software, most notably that of Microsoft, Raymond's bete noir.

tatterdemalion 10y ago

I completely agree that Eric Raymond's writing is mostly spurious (and often offensive), but I want to step in for history as a discipline here. Narrative is a valid historiographic technique, and you don't have to perform social scientific tactics to be serious about being an historian. There are social scientific historians, but history is classified as a humanity for a reason. What's problematic is presenting narrative history as if it were scientific, and also bad narrative history which diminishes rather than elevating the discourse around these events (which Eric Raymond's "great man history of computing [ps I'm the great man]" certainly does).