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Right, RMS at least used to write code. ESR has always been a creepy hacker fanboy, latching on to and idolizing hacker culture, but has never been part of it,
by papsosouid 14y ago
Right, RMS at least used to write code. ESR has always been a creepy hacker fanboy, latching on to and idolizing hacker culture, but has never been part of it, and never produced any code.
- brlewis 14y agoESR did not bring us emacs or gcc, but he has made some contributions: http://www.catb.org/~esr/software.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/software.html I'm most grateful for vc-mode in emacs. (I'm merely addressing a factual point and in no way excusing the way ESR treats RMS in writing.)
- papsosouid 14y agoCertainly "never produced any code" was hyperbole, but "contributions" is being pretty generous. Hobbling together some random scripts nobody has ever used isn't really contributing. Most of what he has tried to contribute has been rejected.
- adavies42 14y agogiflib is probably his most important project in terms of how many people use it gpsd is probably the project he's working on right now with the most potential for widespread use and importance forgeplucker http://home.gna.org/forgeplucker/ http://home.gna.org/forgeplucker/ (oddly not linked at http://www.catb.org/~esr/software.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/software.html) is probably the project he's working on right now that's the most interesting (and ironically something i expect RMS would be a huge fan of)
- indubitably 14y ago""" imgsizer: This is a nifty little HTML authoring tool that will generate correct Netscape-style WIDTH and HEIGHT parameters for each of your IMG tags on an HTML page. This will allow the text portions of the page to load much faster. Requires that you have either identify(1) or a recent file(1) and rdjpegcom(1) installed. The RPM is architecture-independent. Requires Python. """ Ok then.
- adavies42 14y agohuh? did you have a point?
- jiggy2011 14y agoI'm curious, how does ESR make a living? He seems to spend a lot of time running his personal site (which carries no charges or ads) and has written a bunch of Open Source software. I don't see him doing anything that would put money into his bank account, or is he being sponsored by some company? If so who?
- _delirium 14y agoI believe he was employed by the Open Source Initiative (which he co-founded) for some years, as its President. So indirectly funded by the companies that donated to OSI.
- hollerith 14y agoMany years after found the Open Source Initiative, ESR stated publicly that he never made any money from it, and having read most of his writings from that period and a lot of commentary on the organization, I find that statement credible. Also, he has claimed at least a couple of times over the years that he was (at the time of the claim) a consulting programmer.
- gwern 14y agoIIRC he was given a chunk of stock in a Linux IPO and while he lost most of its value in the dot-com crash, it still left him some spare change; add on consulting, royalties, the occasional job like being president, basic nerd frugal living, and you probably have the whole story.
- gonzo 14y agoShrinking book royalties and the earnings of his wife, who is a lawyer.
- jgon 14y agoI am going to simply go by what ESR himself says, which is that his wife is a lawyer and so she goes and works every day which funds his ability to stay at home and write blog posts about the intellectual inferiority of black people and how the poor deserve no government help. No I am not making this up.