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Published on: 1/30/2007
Last Visited: 5/12/2007
Now you may remember from previous blog entries that I have critizied Eric Raymond for his pretentious activities in the free software community.Raymond is probably best known for the fetchmail utility, which fetches mail from a POP3 or IMAP mailbox, and then delivers the messages to a local MTA.Now it's common knowledge that Raymond did not write fetchmail, but rather forked an existing application named popclient.Apparently Raymond claims that based on this contribution (he never mentions that it's actually a forked software from another software, not something he has writen himself) he is a senior cadre who nowdays makes sure the internet works.What a fucking pretentious son of a bitch.Anyways, since software in the commercial world is often developed, and then put into maintanance mode, Raymond thought it would be cool if he could do the same with fetchmail, it is after all, probably the most important piece of open source software there is.So Raymond has declared now that fetchmail is in maintenance mode, and no new features will be added to it, althought it would seriously need some security auditing and fixes to reliability and features that make it impossible to use for example on some mailing-lists.Since fetchmail is a core part of the internet it is only reasonable to keep it in maintenance mode, just to make a point.As you all probably know, Raymond wrote a book about the fetchmail project, named "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" (which I have read, but didn't find it intresting at all).Raymond apparently wants to show the business that open source software can be developed similary to commercial applications.This is all grand and fine, and as Raymond states on his webpage, fetchmail is robust, so obviously it's a good idea to just maintain it.Now if only fetchmail was reliable and robust.Raymond is a fucking joke.
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I found this really intresting page about Eric Raymond on the internet.A hilarious read about a charlatan of the Open Source community.I don't really understand these people who think Eric Raymond is somekind of a guru.He has had all the time in the world to work on Open Source projects because he whored with linux company stocks during the dotcom boom, and still he hasn't produced anything intresting, or even quality software.I must confess that I have tried two software that Raymond has taken part in developing, namely fetchmail and bogofilter.
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Also don't think that Raymond has written fetchmail by himself.He forked a program called popclient to write fetchmail on.
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I guess it's a good thing that Raymond hasn't written any more software, because he clearly is not competent in writing complex software, or even simple programs that do some easy thing such as fetch mail from an POP3 mailbox and forward it to an MTA.Apparently Raymond thinks (I can't track back the authenticity of this quote with google, but it sounds like something Raymond would have uttered) he is a "Today I am one of the senior technical cadre that makes the Internet work, and a core Linux and open-source developer."Atleast the guy is not without self-confidence.
It's very easy to hate Eric Raymond, he is a gun-tooting, close minded, redneck, pompous asshole who takes credit for other peoples work.I wish there were less people like Raymond in the world, and more people like RMS (that's Richard Stallman).
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People like Eric Raymond have effectively made themself obsolete.We don't need people like him, we need good people.Sensible people who are intelligent, open minded, don't have a political agenda to push forward, and competent.That's like the geometrical opposite of Eric Raymond.
The Mark 1 FORTH computer looks intresting.
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Another fradulent figure is Eric Raymond.He has no doubt contributed more than mr. Hall, but, Raymond is not very skilled, so his contributions are mainly documentational.He is probably best known for the fetchmail utility (there is a superior, securitywise, peformancewise and reliabilitywise alternative named getmail, which guarantees that your mail really gets delivered (something fetchmail fails short of) and is written in a nice language, Python) which is used to fetch mail from IMAP/POP servers.Now Raymond went as far as to write a book on the development of fetchmail, it's called The Cathedral and Bazaar, in which he used the fetchmail project as a example of how open source projects work.Now I have read this book, and it's not very intresting.Raymond mostly just makes wild assumptions about how coders can work and how the fact that it's a open source project can somehow cancel out the Brooks laws.There is an intresting article about the book at firstmonday.org by a Nikolai Bezroukov which disects pretty well the whole shallowness of the book.I remember watching some Linux documentary, namely "Revolution OS", which is actually quite a crappy piece, Hannu Puttoses The Code is much more intresting and dwellwes into the Free Software movement more throughoutly, in which they had pieces of interviews with Eric Raymond.
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In one scene they asked Raymond what he thinks of the inherent socialistic features of Open Source, and basically Raymond started trolling something about soviet russia and how people were there interned to "gulaks".It was amazing to see such shortsightedness from a man who claims to be one of the proponent leaders of the Open Source movements.Bruce Perens once commented that if he had known what kind of a person Raymond was he would have never took him with him to form the Open Source Initiative.Raymond has also sent death threats to Perens, etc..
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There is one scene where Raymond takes credit for the whole Mozilla project and later Firefox, by stating that he singlehandedly convinced the Netscape leaders to make the product open source.What utter bullshit.How the hell can somebody who claims bat shit insane stuff like that be a respectable leader for a great community of coders?Apparently Raymond was whoring in the right circles when the stock market went crazy about Linux, and made quite a buck with VA Linux shares, so nowdays he has all the time in the world to write some totally whacky stuff like The Iditorian Manifesto.Is the man totally fucking bat shit insane?I mean, people like that should be on closed wards and feed medication for their delusional thoughts.Raymond is known for having said to Richard Stallman once that "shut up and show them the code".
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Raymond has at many occassions claimed to be a Core Linux Developer:"Today I am one of the senior technical cadre that makes the Internet work, and a core Linux and open-source developer."-Eric S. RaymondLet's see here now: % sed -n '/Eric S. Raymond/,/^$/p' /usr/src/linux/CREDITS N: Eric S. Raymond
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Raymond didn't write fetchmail himself.He forked it of a program named popclient back in the day and began implementation on that.And he fucked it up, fetchmail is rather known for it's crappy quality and security problems that arrise from the crappy quality.
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Raymond did some work on this new configuration mechanism called CML2, which is a configuration system designed on the kbuild 2.5 linux kernel building system.I never really understod what the issue was that CML2 was going to fix.Maybe it simply was a solution in search of a problem.So, Raymond announced CML2 in the summer of 2000, and two years later it was still not ready.The CML2 has caused controversy amongst kernel hackers who don't see a reason to replace something that works quite well with unproven technology.As they didn't include the CML2 program to the kernel, Raymond tried to resort to some catherdal like ways to get the software in. Claiming to be a hacker of social systems he really has some people skills.The kernel hackers listened for a while, and then gave up trying to reason with Raymond.
Raymond is also the maintainer of the Jargon File.I don't know how I feel about this.Some sane person should fork the jargon file and create one without stupid and alien words added there by Raymond, like "Aunt Tillie", or whatever.
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Oh yeah, there is one software that I atleast think is written from scratch by Raymond: bogofilter.You don't want me to get into how well it works for filtering spam.Let's just say it doesn't filter spam, but is eager to put my legimate mail in the spam box.
As we can clearly see, Eric Raymond is a fraud, a non-talented fuck who claims credit for other peoples work.
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I can't recall any time that Stallman would have actually lied about some issues or bragged about his own contributions, something which for example people like Eric Raymond have done on several occassions.
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I recall that our favorite redneck, Eric Raymond, basically outlined that open source is special when it comes to security, because security holes get detected.Now I don't agree fully with Raymond, there is a very limited pool of coders who have the skills to identify security holes, and you don't see them going through different software packages in order to find security holes.It is my opinion that security problem
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