Paul Dourish maintains an archived original version of the Jargon File, because, he says, Raymond’s updates “essentially destroyed what held it together.”
Not much to write about this idiot, really. He has nothing to show for. I remember seeing a kind of comic strip—using photos, I think—where Linus Torvalds gets introduced as author of the Linux kernel, and Richard Stallman for creating the GPL license. Raymond, then, is seen saying I’m with those guys.
2024-01-28: Here is the link: Show them the code. (The code in question being bug-ridden and just horrible, as the quote below regarding fetchmail proves.)
Exactly. He writes awful books – and what did he even contribute to the so-called free software movement (in case it even exists?)
A well-known “source” reports that he first wrote proprietary software (!), then went on to maintain the … Jargon File. Apparently rather poorly, though. Quote:
Paul Dourish maintains an archived original version of the Jargon File, because, he says, Raymond’s updates “essentially destroyed what held it together.”
He also defended a programmer’s right to issue work under proprietary licenses, so what’s the deal with this guy? The comic strip seems correct. A freeloader.
Why is it at all important, seeing how computers have degraded the quality of our lives so much? It is to be rejected entirely. Raymond, a gun-loving fanatic, is the archetype of the American prole (cf. Paul Fussell’s Class).
In the documentation Revolution OS, the definition of cringe reaches new heights when Raymond, without any irony, tells the story of how he met Craig Mundie (Microsoft) in an elevator and responded to his Who are you? with a thousand-yard stare and “I’m your worst nightmare”.
Always the same: huge egos. He also threw a tantrum when the interviewer compared free software to communism. As if Eric S. Raymond is qualified to talk about such topics anyway.
Worse, he defends polyarmory, basically just another crook addicted to sex and shoddily-written sci-fi literature. Not a man of taste or good breeding, let alone having a thorough education! Yet, the arrogance of this man is astounding.
He doesn’t even get the connection between so-called “polyarmory”, which is just fornication, and the decline of the West. He wonders why we didn’t live like this in the past, why it comes up now, thinking it may have to do with the “emancipation” of women. He even believes women are in favor of it! This does not make sense at all. It is, as Unwin has shown in Sex and Culture, sign of a dying civilization. Spengler thought so, too. Eric S. Raymond, though, does not read, or he reads only pop and science fiction literature. Mush.
Raymond needs to ignore the fact that envy is usually the result of such arrangements, instead claiming we ought to be above such instincts … while indulging in fornication … Is he … that dumb?
The IT field sure is full of weirdos and imbeciles, especially if they are women, who usually are feminists like Valerie Anita Aurora (Val Henson), who thinks we still live in a patriarchy … you’ve got to be joking.
Writing software is not rocket science. Chris Langan was lonely most of his life, he married when he was almost fifty. His IQ of 210 is higher than Raymond’s for sure. That his blog is titled “Armed and Dangerous: Sex, software, politics, and firearms. Life’s simple pleasures” says it all. You can’t get cruder than this.
It may be compensation due to his illness, as he certainly is not very dangerous, nor really tall (from what I could see online, he seems to suffer from having very short limbs). Which is not his fault, though playing “online superman” is.
Almost as self-unaware as the other two imbeciles I wrote about earlier, koanic as well as James A. Donald, who also used to comment on esr’s blog. All three are sex-obsessed morons.
His cheesy, corny advice regarding “dating for geeks” is worthless, just like all the rest of game literature. Otherwise, why would Rob Landley, who, according to his own about page, is friends with Raymond and his wife, Cathy, state that he is terminally single? Why not use this crook’s advice? Because it’s worthless, deranged garbage.
On the other hand, this Landley guy thinks Raymond went crazy, though Landley is a rabid feminist, a teller of lies. He also claims Shockley stole credit for the transistor from Bardeen and Brattain, just as Watson stole credit for discovering the structure of DNA from Rosalind Franklin. Another direct quote from Landley, then I’m done with yet another know-it-all: “Eric had at least DONE his early work”. … and that would be …? Writing horrible books? Having promiscuous sex?
“Polyarmory” … Polyarmory! This guy has nothing to do, too much time on his hands. Has no idea where we’re heading, defends the degeneration.
When what once was Christendom lies in front of us, broken to pieces, utterly destroyed – then they will wish to live during those supposedly awful “prude” Victorian times.
Idiots.
For example, he was maintainer of fetchmail, known to be awfully buggy and a horrible piece of software. That his gpsd—he patched an existing project in this case—runs on one billion phones, on robot submarines even, is no reason to rejoice.
It just shows what kind of creeps are writing the software that people are almost forced to use nowadays. Another creep with way too much influence is Buterin of Ethereum, who is not worth commenting on much, though. In the latter case, the original developer of bitcoin isn’t even known, whereas Buterin is lusting after attention like a madman.
To quote a comment from a YouTube video regarding creepy esr:
Not sure if I should be worried that Eric Raymond’s code is running on robot submarines, given all the bugs and security holes in fetchmail…
Regarding fetchmail, the original author of getmail, Charles Cazabon, thought so as well:
Why did you write getmail? Why not just use fetchmail?
The below text is by Charles Cazabon, getmail’s original author:
Short answer: … well, the short answer is mostly unprintable. The long answer is … well, long:
[…]
When people have pointed out problems in fetchmail’s design and implementation, it’s maintainer has frequently ignored them, or (worse yet) gone in the completely wrong direction in the name of "fixing" the problems. For instance, fetchmail’s configuration file syntax has been criticized as being needlessly difficult to write; instead of cleaning up the syntax, the maintainer instead included a GUI configuration-file-writing program, leading to comments like:
The punchline is that fetchmail sucks, even if it does have giddily-engineered whizbang configurator apps.
As an example, Dan Bernstein, author of qmail and other software packages, once noted to the qmail list:
Last night, root@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx reinjected thirty old messages from various authors to qmail@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
This sort of idiocy happens much more often than most subscribers know, thanks to a broken piece of software by Eric Raymond called fetchmail. Fortunately, qmail and ezmlm have loop-prevention mechanisms that stop these messages before they are distributed to subscribers. The messages end up bouncing to the wrong place, thanks to another fetchmail bug, but at least the mailing list is protected.
–D. J. BernsteinThe maintainer also ignored dozens of complaints about fetchmail’s behaviour, stating (by fiat) that fetchmail was bug-free and had entered "maintenance mode", allowing him to ignore further bug reports.
[…]
Further, no one would know about esr had he not dabbled in writing Open Source software—which often enough seems to get criticized, though I am not a programmer nor do I have any interest in it. However, it’s easy to find such comments. For example, here is another developer calling fetchmail an “abomination before God”.
There are more talented programmers who are not even known much; Raymond is mostly known for a horribly-titled book (the bazaar nonsense). Which also shows his contempt for Christianity; not much of a wonder given that he identifies as a pagan. I did not read this essay and certainly never will; however, here, too, it is easy to find critical articles, one calling it The Cathedral and the Bizarre.
If all he did were playing the flute and writing his awful blog, no one would care or even know about this creepy chap. I even read that he lives off of his wife and is a physics quack.
This also shows that he has to accept God’s design regarding marriage and monogamy, too. It doesn’t matter if he defends his degenerate “polyarmoric” lifestyle—which is a moronic word anyway, being a mixture of Latin and Greek.
After all, what they are doing is simply fornicating out in the open; he would not be able to live his life were he not married or living with his wife. Were he to live in the orgy he wants to live in, he would be homeless.
Those who are high IQ and not psychopathic are unable and not willing to live such a life anyway, as Nils M. Holm has demonstrated.
Some ridiculous quotes showing how far removed from reality he is:
I’m a muscular guy with a strong physical presence; people look at the way I dress and carry myself and then aren’t very surprised to learn that I’ve lived on three continents, visited over fifteen countries, been fluent in three languages besides English, and that I’m a serious martial artist who can fight hand-to-hand in any of three styles or with sword or pistol. […] I’m an intellectual, a thinker, a geek. I could dress to emphasize that, but why bother? It’s going to be obvious whenever I open my mouth.
Now, he may be tall, I don’t know, but he certainly does not seem muscular. And who cares? I made fun of this before. As if Goethe was muscular! Idiot!
Also, why bother to dress adequately? Because this is part of what defines a civilization. To quote Don Colacho:
Evening dress is the first step toward civilization.
As I wrote above regarding the movie he was part of, he became rather angry when asked what to think of Open Source being likened to Communism. He did not seem to be very content, I rather think he knows he is not the big shot he portrays himself as.
Another quote where he seems to want to display his lobotomy to us – why else write such nonsense?
ESR writing in his blog on September 19th, 2002 (’Imperialists by necessity?’): “There is precedent; the British did a pretty good job of civilizing India and we did a spectacularly effective one on Japan. And the U.S. would be well equipped to do it again; our economy is now so large that we could run a globe-spanning empire from the petty-cash drawer. Seriously. The U.S, a hyperpower so dominant that no imaginable coalition of other nations could defeat it at conventional warfare, spends a ridiculously low percentage of GNP (6%, if I recall correctly) on its military.”
I found a mirror of the quote above, where he also writes:
Civilizing the barbarians needn’t even be a bloody process if you start the job right after their will has been smashed by a major defeat in war. The U.S. burned essentially every major Japanese city except Kyoto to the ground with incendiaries during World War Two and then atom-bombed two of them. This seemed to help. It would be nice if we didn’t have to get so drastic this time, but it might come to that yet; judging by measures like relative GDP and number of Nobel prizes earned, the Arab/Islamic world is actually further behind the civilization curve than the Japanese were in their militarist phase. They may need to be smashed flatter before a latter-day MacArthur will be able to do anything with them.
To blanket-bomb an area like Germany, a country of high culture, is barbarous itself. Or dropping nuclear bombs on Japan – Claude Eatherly became mentally ill, he rejected what he had done.
Quote from here regarding Hiroshima and Nagasaki:
The most credible estimates cluster around a “low” of 110,000 mortalities and a “high” of 210,000, an enormous gap. (The estimates for each city have a range of ±10,000.)
Pretty disgusting. Count to 100,000 and imagine that every single one was an individual human being with an eternal soul. How is that not barbaric? To quote Don Colacho again:
For a society that lives among statistics, to suspect that each unit is a unique person with his own destiny turns out to be troubling and alarming.
The so highly acclaimed ‘dominion of man over nature’ turned out to be merely an enormous capability to kill.
Man no longer knows how to invent anything that does not serve to kill better or to make the world a little more vulgar.
A greater capacity for killing is the criterion of “progress” between two peoples or two epochs.
The most recent generations are particularly boring: believing in effect that they invented violence and sex, they copulate doctrinairely and doctrinairely kill.
Nothing guarantees man that what he invents will not kill him.
Iraq was bombed to pieces, too. Which Günter Maschke—who was more intelligent and far better read than esr will ever be—called a techno massacre.
The US he defends—even in 2002 you could have known this—acts against its own people anyway.
Also quite laughable to call other nations barbaric seeing how he lives a jungle-like lifestyle regarding marriage; (what such degenerates call “polyarmory”.) Islamic polygamy is more civilised than the chaotic, decadent nonsense he defends.
This is a joke, this guy is a tool indeed. Who even cares about those guys? Puffing yourself up on the internet is the definition of a loser.
I don’t care about life and am glad when I’m out; I only live because God, Christ Jesus, forces me to. Otherwise I would kill myself as fast as possible. My life is not great or worth living, and it will not change anytime soon.
You can have it all, it is of no worth to me anyway. Like Andy Nowicki, who is also a more intelligent and worthwhile author to read, I find the very basis that flings us into the world all but palatable. Of which Raymond cannot get enough …
Nowicki laid it out brilliantly in his Confessions of a Would-Be Wanker and Notes Before Death.
Most great men were unknown, social outcasts. They weren’t recognized much during their lifetime.
He has a huge ego and would go crazy without the internet. After all, where else is he able to put himself on a pedestal? Men of taste would not care about this moron, he doesn’t even know Latin and Greek, I’m sure. Does he play Mozart on the flute? Or lewd songs to lure women into helping him satisfy his beastly lust?
When he published the email he apparently sent to a Microsoft employee who wanted to recruit him, many found it ridiculous, sick, ugly,
Another quote, from Hacker News:
And he hijacked the Hacker’s Dictionary and proceeded to inject a bunch of his ideological words and definitions in, that in no way represent the hacker community around the early ARPANET and MIT-AI lab from which it came.
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/mit-ai-lab-tourist-policy-f73b77075631
And as if hijacking the Hacker’s Dictionary wasn’t enough, he tried to hijack and corrupt the very meaning of the word "hacker" itself, by presuming to define what a hacker is, by preaching to people about how to become a hacker, by blatantly misrepresenting himself as a great hacker and respected leader of the open source community, even though his programming chops are lackluster and outdated, his social skills are deceptive and manipulative, and his hacker spirit is mean, vindictive, and envious of RMS.
And then there’s his death threat to Bruce Perens that he tried to excuse by explaining that he was only trying to "defame" him.
In 1999, Debian developer Bruce Perens published an "email threat" that he allegedly received from Raymond. Raymond then "clarified" that he only meant to defame Perens. From this we can assume that he is batshit insane and will fucking kill and or write to anyone that says anything about him or his software. If you are lucky you might get an O’Rielly book about you.
This is the message he sent to developer Bruce Perens. Quote:
Today I received the following threat in e-mail from Eric Raymond. The message was copied to the Silicon Valley Linux User’s Group officers, who you may consult regarding its authenticity. The police have been notified.
Because I know that Eric is a firearms enthusiast, for my own protection, I feel the best strategy is for me to publicize the threat widely.
Thanks
Bruce Perens> Damn straight I took it personally. And if you ever again behave like
> that kind of disruptive asshole in public, insult me, and jeopardize
> the interests of our entire tribe, I’ll take it just as personally –
> and I will find a way to make you regret it. Watch your step.
There is nothing else to add.
Well, there is one thing to add indeed. While writing about another creep, I stumbled upon this gem:
When I wrote “Richard Stallman’s Disgrace”, I included the following anecdote from a 2011 email from a DF reader:
I worked 10 years ago at VA Linux which had Richard Stallman on its board of directors. You might have heard that Stallman applied his open source ideas to his publicly open marriage as well. The problem was that he was more than open. He made overt sexual advances to women at work. One young woman who worked next to me was so upset from his multiple advances that she took it to senior management. She was able to deal with the problem without taking the issue outside the company. I don’t know the details, but she was given advanced warning anytime Stallman was headed over so that she could leave. He was a creep and women at the company knew to stay away.
And he smelled horrible.
Though another imbecile—Zed Shaw—pointed out that the guy in question is actually Eric S. Raymond … apparently, the so-called free software movement is full of creepy weirdos.
The person originally claiming it was Stallman confirmed that he really meant Raymond instead:
OMG, I was referring to the guy on our board, so it must have been Eric Raymond. I’m so sorry. I did conflate them. I guess I assumed there were not two creepy guys talking about free and open software. I’m positive it was Eric Raymond.
In retrospect, I don’t know for sure if he smelled or if the woman I worked with and who was propositioned by him merely found him disgusting.
Well, either way, it proves me right: all those “online alphas” are really just mediocre guys or even downright creeps. After all, it is hard to picture a woman who met, say, Cary Grant and then went on to describe him as disgusting (as long as he did not do or say anything disturbing.)
The only reason I could picture this may happen to such a true womanizer would be because she made advances toward Mr. Grant and he rejected them, so that now she would want revenge. Clearly not applicable to Raymond.
This age we are forced to live in is just appallingly stupid and deranged. What a circus …!
Gómez Dávila has the last word:
It is already possible for us to anticipate the combination of brothel, dungeon and circus the universe of tomorrow will have become if man does not succeed in resurrecting a medieval universe.
The modern world demands that we approve what it should not even dare ask us to tolerate.
The only alternative at the end of this century: eastern barracks—western brothel.
The modern world will not be punished.
It is the punishment.Modern man’s life oscillates between two poles: business and sex.
It is impossible to convince the fool that there are pleasures superior to those we share with the rest of the animals.
