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I know that ESR considers himself to be an “LBIP”. Not really convinced that the claim has merit…

by cpach 3y ago

tptacek 3y ago
It pretty clearly does not, and given his role in this program, his placement of himself in it makes the whole thing pretty dubious.
- neilv 3y ago
  This would seem consistent with his pre-Web thinking. For example, IIRC, he tried to organize a contest on behalf of the Internet/Usenet, in which all the computer companies would compete to see who could assemble the best "dream" Unix workstation. IIRC, the unusual thing was that, for his part in facilitating this, he would receive one of the dream workstations personally. (Which, at the time, rubbed me the wrong way, because it seemed like other Internet/Usenet projects were done more volunteer-like. But in hindsight, or at least in today's cultural conventions, someone being upfront about wanting a consideration for their effort on a project seems perfectly reasonable. It just seemed unusual to me as a kid, in the hard separation at the time, between the techie non-commercial Internet altruistic utopia we could imagine at times we were creating, and whatever different world the stereotypical MBAs would like so that they could grab wealth and power disproportionately.) Regarding this new thing, ESR might not need the money today, though he might like to be more back in the center of things, and/or to have a positive impact. In early Web times, business wanted to pick up Linux, etc., and he became an "influencer" for open source -- maybe a figurehead, like "here's the counterculture perspective, and you can work with him; now go at it, business types" -- helping to adapt RMS's mission in a way acceptable to business. So he got a windfall when the Linux IPOs were happening: https://news.slashdot.org/story/99/12/10/0821224/esr-writes-on-surprised-by-wealth https://news.slashdot.org/story/99/12/10/0821224/esr-writes-...
  - elcritch 3y ago
    Given ESR was very wealthy by most any standards, it seems very disingenuous to list himself as an LBIP. His need “high”. Seriously did he waste his fortune in which case I don’t feel bad for him or want to support his wasteful ways. Alternatively he’s still well off and just greedy.
    - tptacek 3y ago
      There's a folkloric belief that ESR got very wealthy, because he wrote a blog post about how wealthy he believed he had gotten on VA Linux, but I don't think that really panned out. If you paid attention to his blog, while he was writing it, the last couple of years the narrative was instead that he was on the edge of not being able to do open source stuff anymore because he had no income; some of his friends/fans even wrote comments complaining about him asking for money, when everyone else just solves this problem by getting a job. I don't know any more than anybody else who reads blog posts about this stuff, but I strongly suspect that he did not in fact blow a giant fortune, but rather, like a lot of people who briefly had a lot of paper wealth at that time, it never really materialized. It's an embarrassing blog post to write, "I thought it was rich, turns out I'm not", so there isn't the matching post.
      - likpok 3y ago
        Based on the lockup alone he can't have gotten that wealthy. LNUX had a 180 day lockup, after which the price had fallen to $40-50 (https://itsfoss.com/story-of-va-linux/ https://itsfoss.com/story-of-va-linux/). That'd be around $6 million based on the blog post (36 million at 274/share). That's of course assuming he sold as quickly as he could. LNUX IPOed right before the dot com crash, a year post IPI it was 9/share (at that price, ~1 million to ESR).
        tptacek 3y ago
        2 years after "Surprised By Wealth", he wrote a commentary about VA Linux's layoffs where he more or less said outright that he'd never cashed out, which wouldn't be surprising, since he was a director of the company. One assumes he managed to get something out, but since he doesn't seem to have had a full-time job after VA Linux, it's easy to see how one could have burned through it. It feels weird doing kremlinology on this stuff; what I feel like I understand about his situation is, wherever he was then, he isn't anymore. Whatever else he was at the time, he was certainly employable. This LBIP thing is comical because regardless of his economic circumstances, he is practically the textbook case of someone you'd want to recognize as not load-bearing. That, by itself, is not a dunk; I'm a similar textbook case: loud, but not anywhere on the Internet's critical path.
Sesse__ 3y ago
He pretty clearly isn't, although he probably believes himself that he is. E.g. he claims about giflib: “This is the library that renders GIFs in your browser […] Without it the modern Internet would be unrecognizable.” Except that no browser that I know of uses giflib (e.g. Chromium uses Skia's GIF decoder, which is WUFFS-based), and GIF clearly isn't an important format for the modern Internet anyway. Besides, giflib's latest release was in 2019, so how load-bearing is his maintainership anyway? Similarly, he somehow seems to believe Android uses his gpsd and thus is “essential for Google Maps”, and it hasn't done so for at _least_ ten years, if ever; it was in one vendor's third_party directory at some point, but I don't think it was ever in Android proper.
hollerith 3y ago
ESR explained free-software licensing in a way that made it appealing to executives and other decision-makers. In 1998, when Netscape released the source code for its browser on open-source terms, "Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale cited Raymond's 'Cathedral and the Bazaar' essay as a major influence upon the company's decision": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar#cite_note-Williams2011-7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar#c... (The Mozilla Foundation was created to act as the custodian of the source code released by Netscape in 1998.) Although I can certainly understand why people do not like ESR and although he might not have made any significant contributions lately, you cannot deny that in the past he's had a positive profound effect on the industry.
- tptacek 3y ago
  Alternate take: ESR wrote a very long effortpost at a time when effortposts of any kind were, like, "get an ISBN number for it" novelties, and so found himself in a privileged position with respect to communicating about an open source movement he himself had practically nothing to do with creating. That post doesn't hold up well today (it's most famous claim has become a running joke). If CATB hadn't been written, some other effortpost would have served precisely the same utility, and open source would have continued along the same timeline. Mozilla didn't happen any faster because of ESR --- even if there are Mozilla people who disagree (I don't know that there are).
  - dtaht 3y ago
    I strongly disagree that esr´s books are irrelevant. You had to be there, in 1998, I guess, facing the prospect of being fired for working on free software, as many were, or facing down the might of the legal apparatus of microsoft, and admiring his rhetorical skill at facing down the suits, as many did, then. He traveled all over the world, giving many inspirational talks. He books were highly influential on me, and if it were not for his encouragement, and support, there would not be, oh, 10B copies of fq_codel running today, cake, or sqm, or better wifi routers, or libreqos. We had fun, too! http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4162 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4162 I did learn from his lesson - when he told me I had to be a front man for the bufferbloat effort, in 2013, for at least 5 years - he quoted the original of this: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” at me... and muttered under his breath, "... and then you become a pariah." I learned from his example. So far, by staying on topic, and keeping my political and personal opinions out of any engagement with anyone on the web, and not writing controversial blogs (I know he has at least 3 he regrets)... I have largely escaped being a pariah, but, have also been working on fixing the same darn thing, for 7 years longer than I ever wanted to.

I know that ESR considers himself to be an “LBIP”. Not really convinced that the claim has merit…

by cpach 3y ago

I know that ESR considers himself to be an “LBIP”. Not really convinced that the claim has merit…

It pretty clearly does not, and given his role in this program, his placement of himself in it makes the whole thing pretty dubious.

neilv 3y ago
This would seem consistent with his pre-Web thinking. For example, IIRC, he tried to organize a contest on behalf of the Internet/Usenet, in which all the computer companies would compete to see who could assemble the best "dream" Unix workstation. IIRC, the unusual thing was that, for his part in facilitating this, he would receive one of the dream workstations personally. (Which, at the time, rubbed me the wrong way, because it seemed like other Internet/Usenet projects were done more volunteer-like. But in hindsight, or at least in today's cultural conventions, someone being upfront about wanting a consideration for their effort on a project seems perfectly reasonable. It just seemed unusual to me as a kid, in the hard separation at the time, between the techie non-commercial Internet altruistic utopia we could imagine at times we were creating, and whatever different world the stereotypical MBAs would like so that they could grab wealth and power disproportionately.) Regarding this new thing, ESR might not need the money today, though he might like to be more back in the center of things, and/or to have a positive impact. In early Web times, business wanted to pick up Linux, etc., and he became an "influencer" for open source -- maybe a figurehead, like "here's the counterculture perspective, and you can work with him; now go at it, business types" -- helping to adapt RMS's mission in a way acceptable to business. So he got a windfall when the Linux IPOs were happening: https://news.slashdot.org/story/99/12/10/0821224/esr-writes-on-surprised-by-wealth https://news.slashdot.org/story/99/12/10/0821224/esr-writes-...
- elcritch 3y ago
  Given ESR was very wealthy by most any standards, it seems very disingenuous to list himself as an LBIP. His need “high”. Seriously did he waste his fortune in which case I don’t feel bad for him or want to support his wasteful ways. Alternatively he’s still well off and just greedy.
  - tptacek 3y ago
    There's a folkloric belief that ESR got very wealthy, because he wrote a blog post about how wealthy he believed he had gotten on VA Linux, but I don't think that really panned out. If you paid attention to his blog, while he was writing it, the last couple of years the narrative was instead that he was on the edge of not being able to do open source stuff anymore because he had no income; some of his friends/fans even wrote comments complaining about him asking for money, when everyone else just solves this problem by getting a job. I don't know any more than anybody else who reads blog posts about this stuff, but I strongly suspect that he did not in fact blow a giant fortune, but rather, like a lot of people who briefly had a lot of paper wealth at that time, it never really materialized. It's an embarrassing blog post to write, "I thought it was rich, turns out I'm not", so there isn't the matching post.
    - likpok 3y ago
      Based on the lockup alone he can't have gotten that wealthy. LNUX had a 180 day lockup, after which the price had fallen to $40-50 (https://itsfoss.com/story-of-va-linux/ https://itsfoss.com/story-of-va-linux/). That'd be around $6 million based on the blog post (36 million at 274/share). That's of course assuming he sold as quickly as he could. LNUX IPOed right before the dot com crash, a year post IPI it was 9/share (at that price, ~1 million to ESR).
      - tptacek 3y ago
        2 years after "Surprised By Wealth", he wrote a commentary about VA Linux's layoffs where he more or less said outright that he'd never cashed out, which wouldn't be surprising, since he was a director of the company. One assumes he managed to get something out, but since he doesn't seem to have had a full-time job after VA Linux, it's easy to see how one could have burned through it. It feels weird doing kremlinology on this stuff; what I feel like I understand about his situation is, wherever he was then, he isn't anymore. Whatever else he was at the time, he was certainly employable. This LBIP thing is comical because regardless of his economic circumstances, he is practically the textbook case of someone you'd want to recognize as not load-bearing. That, by itself, is not a dunk; I'm a similar textbook case: loud, but not anywhere on the Internet's critical path.

Sesse__ 3y ago

He pretty clearly isn't, although he probably believes himself that he is. E.g. he claims about giflib: “This is the library that renders GIFs in your browser […] Without it the modern Internet would be unrecognizable.” Except that no browser that I know of uses giflib (e.g. Chromium uses Skia's GIF decoder, which is WUFFS-based), and GIF clearly isn't an important format for the modern Internet anyway. Besides, giflib's latest release was in 2019, so how load-bearing is his maintainership anyway? Similarly, he somehow seems to believe Android uses his gpsd and thus is “essential for Google Maps”, and it hasn't done so for at _least_ ten years, if ever; it was in one vendor's third_party directory at some point, but I don't think it was ever in Android proper.

hollerith 3y ago

ESR explained free-software licensing in a way that made it appealing to executives and other decision-makers. In 1998, when Netscape released the source code for its browser on open-source terms, "Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale cited Raymond's 'Cathedral and the Bazaar' essay as a major influence upon the company's decision": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar#cite_note-Williams2011-7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar#c... (The Mozilla Foundation was created to act as the custodian of the source code released by Netscape in 1998.) Although I can certainly understand why people do not like ESR and although he might not have made any significant contributions lately, you cannot deny that in the past he's had a positive profound effect on the industry.

tptacek 3y ago
Alternate take: ESR wrote a very long effortpost at a time when effortposts of any kind were, like, "get an ISBN number for it" novelties, and so found himself in a privileged position with respect to communicating about an open source movement he himself had practically nothing to do with creating. That post doesn't hold up well today (it's most famous claim has become a running joke). If CATB hadn't been written, some other effortpost would have served precisely the same utility, and open source would have continued along the same timeline. Mozilla didn't happen any faster because of ESR --- even if there are Mozilla people who disagree (I don't know that there are).
- dtaht 3y ago
  I strongly disagree that esr´s books are irrelevant. You had to be there, in 1998, I guess, facing the prospect of being fired for working on free software, as many were, or facing down the might of the legal apparatus of microsoft, and admiring his rhetorical skill at facing down the suits, as many did, then. He traveled all over the world, giving many inspirational talks. He books were highly influential on me, and if it were not for his encouragement, and support, there would not be, oh, 10B copies of fq_codel running today, cake, or sqm, or better wifi routers, or libreqos. We had fun, too! http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4162 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4162 I did learn from his lesson - when he told me I had to be a front man for the bufferbloat effort, in 2013, for at least 5 years - he quoted the original of this: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” at me... and muttered under his breath, "... and then you become a pariah." I learned from his example. So far, by staying on topic, and keeping my political and personal opinions out of any engagement with anyone on the web, and not writing controversial blogs (I know he has at least 3 he regrets)... I have largely escaped being a pariah, but, have also been working on fixing the same darn thing, for 7 years longer than I ever wanted to.