6 ms·

I’m out of the loop, why do you say he’s a horrible person?

KirinDave 7y ago
It's sort of out of scope so let's not dwell on his slow descent into predictably cantankerous obscurity. You can descend into his blogs, sword and torch in hand, ready to do ideological combat with the horrors from beyond the stars that lurk there on your own time. The key idea: that he is an ILBP (or has been in 10 years) is absurd. He is not, and he claims he's not hurting for money.
- dfrage 7y ago
  > The key idea: that he is an ILBP (or has been in 10 years) is absurd. He is not.... This attitude denies support to projects like NTPsec, for which he's the technical lead, your take on this concept only applies to current maintainers of existing projects. Even then, he's converting GCC to git, the latter indirectly bears a great deal of "Internet Load".
  - KirinDave 7y ago
    I deny support for NTPsec specifically because I think it's an idea who's time has passed and now soldiers on because of inertia rather than good sense. It's sort of a meme that any project ending in "sec" is vestigal. So no: they don't get my support. Why would they? Same with DNSsec. Useless project, please desist.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - tptacek 7y ago
      Can I just use this spot to remind everyone that when one of his commenters found an integer handling bug in the ntpsec codebase, Raymond said "I will neither confirm nor deny that I left it in there deliberately to see who would be sharp enough to spot it". You can find it in the thread on his blog post titled (I am not making this up) "Thinking like a master programmer, redux". Another fun fact: Cure53 audited ntpd and ntpsec concurrently, and found an instance where ntpsec rewrote a function and managed to regress out a patch for a security vulnerability, reintroducing it into their codebase. (By the way: overwhelmingly, with I think just one exception --- not counting the regression above --- the significant findings in that report applied uniformly to both ntpsec and ntpd). Additional fun: until 2017, the ntpsec project apparently didn't even enable system/runtime mitigations like ASLR (according to the "Fix/Validation log" in the Mozilla SOS project). Conclusion of that report: "While the NTPsec project emphasizes cleaning up its ancestors’ flaws, the difference regarding quality between the original code and the current implementation was not as great as anticipated."
      - kasey_junk 7y ago
        I feel like this violates the spirit of the ban...
        tptacek 7y ago
        The ban applies only to Twitter.
        pvg 7y ago
        Yes, this is unconstructive legalism. Is anyone out there checking whether he's written something about Iranian agents attaching strumpet mines to his car which he then successfully demagnetized with his Aikido? Apropos of nothing at all, if someone were to gather his greatest hits into some sort of collection, it should probably be named Bearin' Load
nudq 7y ago
He's an old-style libertarian, obsessed with "freedom". You might have noticed that "freedom" in most of its old-style manifestations is not in vogue because hate, e.g. freedom of speech is out of fashion because it's merely a platform for haters to spew hate. That's why he's horrible.
neilk 7y ago
ESR has done, and apparently continues to do, many useful things for open source. But his various personality disorders have reset that karma back to zero, or possibly put him in negative territory. It started early... https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/1999/04/msg00623.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/1999/04/msg00623.html And here is a generally well-sourced summary: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond
- nudq 7y ago
  > his various personality disorders Lovely. To inject some psychological precision, only his narcissism can be considered a personality disorder. Being old, white, or male... no. Not yet.
- brandmeyer 7y ago
  Its kinda hard to accept a reference as rational when the opening summary describes him as having "batshit insane wingnut tendencies." Those are not appeals to reason, they are appeals to emotion and tribalism.
  - tptacek 7y ago
    Raymond is an avowed and weirdly obsessed racial supremacist (and, at times, an advocate of political violence). That's not an appeal to tribalism but rather a recorded fact; both conservatives and liberals alike would find his stated beliefs horrifying if laid out in front of them rather than scattered throughout his various discursive blog posts and comment threads. There is a general and valid concern in our industry about a liberal orthodoxy that makes it at least socially unsafe to express political thoughts. People who share that concern should have an even bigger problem with Raymond, who is an attention-seeking caricature of conservative or libertarian belief. People who have couched their bigotry in far more careful and subtle language than Raymond have found themselves ostracized from conservative circles, and for good reason. I think the better way to engage with Raymond is on his manifest deficiencies as a professional engineer and technologist, and wouldn't want to start a rebuttal to his request for donations with his politics. But I also wouldn't want to let stand the idea that the opprobrium he attracts is rooted in orthodoxy or tribalism.

It's sort of out of scope so let's not dwell on his slow descent into predictably cantankerous obscurity. You can descend into his blogs, sword and torch in hand, ready to do ideological combat with the horrors from beyond the stars that lurk there on your own time. The key idea: that he is an ILBP (or has been in 10 years) is absurd. He is not, and he claims he's not hurting for money.

dfrage 7y ago
> The key idea: that he is an ILBP (or has been in 10 years) is absurd. He is not.... This attitude denies support to projects like NTPsec, for which he's the technical lead, your take on this concept only applies to current maintainers of existing projects. Even then, he's converting GCC to git, the latter indirectly bears a great deal of "Internet Load".
- KirinDave 7y ago
  I deny support for NTPsec specifically because I think it's an idea who's time has passed and now soldiers on because of inertia rather than good sense. It's sort of a meme that any project ending in "sec" is vestigal. So no: they don't get my support. Why would they? Same with DNSsec. Useless project, please desist.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - tptacek 7y ago
    Can I just use this spot to remind everyone that when one of his commenters found an integer handling bug in the ntpsec codebase, Raymond said "I will neither confirm nor deny that I left it in there deliberately to see who would be sharp enough to spot it". You can find it in the thread on his blog post titled (I am not making this up) "Thinking like a master programmer, redux". Another fun fact: Cure53 audited ntpd and ntpsec concurrently, and found an instance where ntpsec rewrote a function and managed to regress out a patch for a security vulnerability, reintroducing it into their codebase. (By the way: overwhelmingly, with I think just one exception --- not counting the regression above --- the significant findings in that report applied uniformly to both ntpsec and ntpd). Additional fun: until 2017, the ntpsec project apparently didn't even enable system/runtime mitigations like ASLR (according to the "Fix/Validation log" in the Mozilla SOS project). Conclusion of that report: "While the NTPsec project emphasizes cleaning up its ancestors’ flaws, the difference regarding quality between the original code and the current implementation was not as great as anticipated."
    - kasey_junk 7y ago
      I feel like this violates the spirit of the ban...
      - tptacek 7y ago
        The ban applies only to Twitter.
        pvg 7y ago
        Yes, this is unconstructive legalism. Is anyone out there checking whether he's written something about Iranian agents attaching strumpet mines to his car which he then successfully demagnetized with his Aikido? Apropos of nothing at all, if someone were to gather his greatest hits into some sort of collection, it should probably be named Bearin' Load

nudq 7y ago

He's an old-style libertarian, obsessed with "freedom". You might have noticed that "freedom" in most of its old-style manifestations is not in vogue because hate, e.g. freedom of speech is out of fashion because it's merely a platform for haters to spew hate. That's why he's horrible.

neilk 7y ago

ESR has done, and apparently continues to do, many useful things for open source. But his various personality disorders have reset that karma back to zero, or possibly put him in negative territory. It started early... https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/1999/04/msg00623.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/1999/04/msg00623.html And here is a generally well-sourced summary: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond

nudq 7y ago
> his various personality disorders Lovely. To inject some psychological precision, only his narcissism can be considered a personality disorder. Being old, white, or male... no. Not yet.
brandmeyer 7y ago
Its kinda hard to accept a reference as rational when the opening summary describes him as having "batshit insane wingnut tendencies." Those are not appeals to reason, they are appeals to emotion and tribalism.
- tptacek 7y ago
  Raymond is an avowed and weirdly obsessed racial supremacist (and, at times, an advocate of political violence). That's not an appeal to tribalism but rather a recorded fact; both conservatives and liberals alike would find his stated beliefs horrifying if laid out in front of them rather than scattered throughout his various discursive blog posts and comment threads. There is a general and valid concern in our industry about a liberal orthodoxy that makes it at least socially unsafe to express political thoughts. People who share that concern should have an even bigger problem with Raymond, who is an attention-seeking caricature of conservative or libertarian belief. People who have couched their bigotry in far more careful and subtle language than Raymond have found themselves ostracized from conservative circles, and for good reason. I think the better way to engage with Raymond is on his manifest deficiencies as a professional engineer and technologist, and wouldn't want to start a rebuttal to his request for donations with his politics. But I also wouldn't want to let stand the idea that the opprobrium he attracts is rooted in orthodoxy or tribalism.