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He wrote The Cathedral and the Bazaar in 1997, an essay about open source software development, and then later a book. He founded the Open Source Initiative (OS
by Symbiote 1y ago
He wrote The Cathedral and the Bazaar in 1997, an essay about open source software development, and then later a book. He founded the Open Source Initiative (OSI).
I wasn't aware of his political views, especially more recent statements he's made such as the linked tweet above/below.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar
- toyg 1y agoHe has always been somewhat on the right of the American political spectrum, mostly rooted there because (people thought) of his maximalist views over the right to own guns. When he (co)started OSI, he was one of the most business-friendly personalities in the FOSS ecosystem. Over the last 15 years he seems to have shifted further and further into the MAGA spectrum, increasingly exhibiting outright racist views. It might be age, it might be the evolution of the political debate over there, but the fact is that he's utterly unpresentable now, and I'm surprised anyone still listens to what he's basically just an old racist uncle yelling at everyone.
- keanb 1y agoUtterly unpresentable because some don’t like his politics? That’s bizarre.
- saubeidl 1y ago" If you kick out your Jews and replace them with Black women, that's a 25 to 30-point drop in average IQ. In an individual this would be severe brain damage." Some politics are not within the realm of what is considered acceptable.
- p_l 1y agoAn important part to remember is that Cathedral refers to GCC and Bazaar to EGCS, which was a GCC fork that IIRC ESR was big part of and which ultimately replaced GCC
- roryirvine 1y agoI don't think ESR had anything to do with egcs directly but, yeah, the egcs/gcc split along with the XEmacs / GNU Emacs fracas were likely inspiration for CatB. He was always better known as a writer than as a developer - his most significant FOSS contributions were probably fetchmail prior to 2003, and the ill-fated CML2 kernel config system around 2001. I'm not aware of anything of note that he's produced since.
- p_l 1y agoWell, better said would be that ESR was... loud around EGCS? I got into Linux and FOSS essentially just as EGCS took over GCC for good, so I am less clear on details
- roryirvine 1y agoThat's fair! And, yes, he seemed to enjoy rushing into every flamewar he could find back then. It's one of the reasons this current tweet is so surprising - he's moaning about "drama and politics", "negative useful work", and "shit-stirrers" "who are more annoying to work with than [their] contributions justify", but doesn't seem to realise that all of those complaints could have been made more strongly still about ESR himself, especially when he was in his pomp.