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

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).