Eric Raymond

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"Eric Raymond": President Emeritus and Co-Founder of the Open Source Initiative.

Bio

A hacker himself since the 1970s, Raymond has always taken an interest in hacker culture. When the Free Software Movement took off in the 1990s, therefore, he set out to try and understand how — contrary to all expectations — hackers were able to develop technically superior software, not least the now ubiquitous GNU/Linux operating system. The result was the highly influential essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which was published in 1997.

When, a year later, Netscape decided to open the source code of its browser (and indicated that it had been partly influenced by Raymond's essay), Raymond and a number of other Free Software supporters responded by founding the Open Source Initiative (OSI) — with the aim of re-branding Free Software as Open Source Software and making it more palatable to the "suits".Today Open Source software has become mainstream, and much of the credit for this must go to Raymond."(from the profile by Richard Poynder)


Additional Details

Source: http://www.answers.com/Eric%20Raymond


Hacker

Born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1957, Raymond lived on three continents before settling in Pennsylvania in 1971. His involvement with hacker culture began in 1976 and he contributed to his first open source software project in 1982. Since then, his primary contribution to open source software has been maintaining the fetchmail email client. Minor contributions have included Emacs editing modes and portions of libraries like GNU ncurses, giflib/libungif, and libpng. He has also written a number of How-to documents that are now included in the Linux Documentation Project corpus. Raymond's public claim to be a "Core Linux Developer" has been disputed since he has never had code accepted into the Linux kernel. His sole attempt to contribute to Linux (the CML2 configuration system) was rejected by Linux kernel developers.

Raymond initially became known by hackers for his adoption of the Jargon File. Some have become dissatisfied with the resulting character of the work due to the inclusion of material invented by Raymond or reflecting his own political views. Objectors to Raymond's stewardship are of the opinion that the Jargon File should be an impartial record of "hacker culture".


"Open source"

Raymond coined the aphorism "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." He credits Linus Torvalds with the inspiration for this quotation, which he dubs "Linus's law". The quotation appears in The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary, Sebastopol, California: O'Reilly & Associates. In 1997, Raymond became a prominent voice in the open source movement and was a co-founder of the Open Source Initiative. He also took on the self-appointed role of ambassador of open source to the press, business and public. The release of the Mozilla (then Netscape) source code in 1998 was an early accomplishment. He has agreed to lecture at Microsoft [6], has accepted stock options from VA Software to provide credibility to the company and act as a hired "corporate conscience" and has spoken in more than fifteen countries on six continents.

Raymond has had a number of public disputes with other figures in the free software movement. His disagreement with Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation's views on the ethics of free software in favour of a more market-driven stance has exacerbated some pre-existing tensions in the community. In 1999, Raymond published an article entitled "Shut Up And Show Them The Code". The article criticized Richard Stallman over tactics to promote free and open source software, implying Stallman spent too much time proselytizing and not producing code.

Raymond addressed some of his critics from the software development community in his 1999 essay "Take My Job, Please!", stating that he was willing to "back to the hilt" anyone qualified and willing to take his job and present the case for open source to the world. In February 2005, Raymond stepped down as the president of the Open Source Initiative.

=More Information

Interview by Richard Poynder, at http://poynder.blogspot.com/2006/03/interview-with-eric-raymond.html

Key Books

The Cathedral and the Bazaar (O'Reilly; hardcover ISBN 1565927249, October 1999; paperback ISBN 0596001088, January 2001) — includes "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", "Homesteading the Noosphere", "The Magic Cauldron" and "Revenge of the Hackers"