Microsoft tries to recruit Eric Raymond

[Kintaro]

Funny link, but not quite accurate.  ESR has plenty of street cred.  He has been active in the hacker community for over 30 years, and his work on LISP and Emacs is more than enough to place him in the annals of computer history.  Additionally, I think that his  essay "The Cathedral & the Bazaar" is the basis for how Linux and most other open source projects are run today, and his exposure of the potential flaws of Brooks' Law is probably exactly what got many companies, small and F500 large, to use Linux.

For more info, read Brooks' "The Mythical Man-Month" - clearly, your buddy has not done so, and therefore is unable to understand "The Cathedral & the Bazaar", which is probably why he doesn't like it.

The reply to the email from Microsoft is funny, however I must say that he did very little in the hacker community except write on his own ideals with the Free Software movement. He did very little coding and all of his additions to the Linux kernel have been rejected to date. He wrote a small portion of fetchmail among things.

He is more of a writer than a coder. He is very bright, however on a particular level I rather dislike the guy.

[piratePenguin]

however on a particular level I rather dislike the guy.

And what would that be?

[worker201]

The reply to the email from Microsoft is funny, however I must say that he did very little in the hacker community except write on his own ideals with the Free Software movement. He did very little coding and all of his additions to the Linux kernel have been rejected to date. He wrote a small portion of fetchmail among things.

He is more of a writer than a coder. He is very bright, however on a particular level I rather dislike the guy.

I think you are underestimating his contribution to Emacs and Lisp, especially the fact that Emacs has a Lisp compiler inside it.  And if you read "Cathedral...", you will find that his work on the fetchmail project was more than a "small portion".

[Kintaro]

Still he has quite the temper, and he also is an egomaniac.

And I should read something by Eric S Raymond for a balanced report on the work he did on fetchmail :S?

This is how wonderful Eric S Raymond's Open Source is...
http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=585008+0+archive/2001/freebsd-arch/20010218.freebsd-arch
http://pyropus.ca/software/getmail/faq.html#faq-about-why
http://esr.1accesshost.com/

[worker201]

I suppose Eric himself would say that those are features, not bugs.  The project leader, even though he solicits programming assistance from the community, is still the project leader.  Meaning that until someone does a better job, Eric decides what goes in his program and what doesn't.

Personally, I don't use fetchmail, so I can't say for sure.  But I really like the stuff I've read by ESR.  If nothing else, he is the de facto spokesman for the open source movement.  That would be a damn good reason to get a big head, by the way.

[Kintaro]

More like 'self proclaimed' spokesperson for the open source movement.

[worker201]

Nobody else is talking as much, or getting listened to as much.  He got the job by default, but I think we need somebody loud at this point.