3 ms·
> My opinion of him isn't too high. He likes to brandy himself about as some sort of hacker hero, but in truth, he's not really contributed much to OSS. OSS ES
by iuguy 18y ago
> My opinion of him isn't too high. He likes to brandy himself about as some sort of hacker hero, but in truth, he's not really contributed much to OSS.
OSS ESR has been involved in or founded:
Fetchmail,
GPSd,
CML2,
The Cathedral and the Bazaar,
The Jargon File,
Terminfo/Termcap,
VC Mode/GUB in Emacs (ESR is the second biggest lisp contributor to Emacs after RMS),
Contribs to Gnuplot, Gnome, Python, Groff and Nethack,
GNU Toolkit SED,
Hexdump,
gif2png,
Bogofilter,
Countless Howtos at the LDP
With the exception of the above, you're right he's not contributed much to OSS. I'm not saying ESR's not a polarising person (I've met both ESR and RMS, both can be black and white people) but he has contributed a lot to OSS.
- wheels 18y agoAs noted below, his versions (or contributions) to most of those software projects were all pretty trivial. And listing "projects" like hexdump is kind of cute -- it's 211 lines of code. The one claim that stood out there -- the one that gave a really testable statement that would have surprised me if true was, "ESR is the second biggest lisp contributor to Emacs after RMS". I thought, hey, there'd be a surprise, so I decided to run cvstat on the emacs lisp subdir: - RMS contributed the 2nd most code to Emacs' Lisp with 217542 lines of changes. - ESR contributed the 39th most code to Emacs' Lisp with 6367 lines of changes. The reason that I don't like the guy so much is because he claims to speak for a movement, that by his own prognostication is a meritocracy, and I don't feel like he has the credibility for that. Combined with the fact that I think a lot of what he says is bozo-riffic, I'd prefer him step back from his self-appointed spokesman position.
- blogsworth 18y agoi.e. nothing substantial in the past half-decade