Stop Microsoft

All Things Microsoft => Microsoft as a Company => Topic started by: LinuxRocks on 9 September 2005, 20:39

Title: Microsoft tries to recruit Eric Raymond
Post by: LinuxRocks on 9 September 2005, 20:39
OK, this is freak'n hilarious. MS just got kicked in the head by an open source evangelist. This is great. Take a look at the original e-mail and then Eric's reply...

MS is really a bunch of idiots!!!

http://esr.ibiblio.org/index.php?p=208 (http://esr.ibiblio.org/index.php?p=208)
Title: Re: Microsoft tries to recruit Eric Raymond
Post by: Lead Head on 9 September 2005, 20:43
lol
Title: Re: Microsoft tries to recruit Eric Raymond
Post by: worker201 on 9 September 2005, 21:22
ESR for president.
Title: Re: Microsoft tries to recruit Eric Raymond
Post by: WMD on 9 September 2005, 21:28
Quote from: worker201
ESR for president.

Quoted for emphasis.
Title: Re: Microsoft tries to recruit Eric Raymond
Post by: MarathoN on 9 September 2005, 22:08
Hahaha, that's brilliant! :)
Title: Re: Microsoft tries to recruit Eric Raymond
Post by: piratePenguin on 9 September 2005, 23:09
It's a step up from hiring 11 year olds.
Title: Re: Microsoft tries to recruit Eric Raymond
Post by: muzzy on 10 September 2005, 07:11
If you read the replies to his post about it, people are noticing that the email address begins with v- which means it's a vendor address, not anyone in microsoft themselves. Also, it's a generic template which other people have gotten as well.

Eric's response is still funny. I love the brimstone bit. :)
Title: Re: Microsoft tries to recruit Eric Raymond
Post by: Jenda on 12 September 2005, 22:02
:D hilarious
Title: Re: Microsoft tries to recruit Eric Raymond
Post by: piratePenguin on 13 September 2005, 22:21
This was brought up on a list I'm subscribed to. One person had a fairley interesting response:
Quote
This doesn't say much to me except reconfirming my opinion that
Eric's ego is totally out of control.  "Microsoft's worst
nightmare"?  Taking *personal* credit for getting "the Fortune 500"
to buy in to Linux?  All this on foot of a series of immensely
tedious books which each strain their chosen metaphor well past its
limit and a bunch of theories which are Just Plain Wrong in my
opinion.  The arrogance and Plain Rudeness of his reply to the
recruiter (who, as has been hashed out on slashdot and elsewhere,
isn't even a MS employee) is breathtaking.

http://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/archive/show-them-the-code (http://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/archive/show-them-the-code) says it
all, IMO.
The link is hilarious!

Disclaimer: I don't dislike ESR.
Title: Re: Microsoft tries to recruit Eric Raymond
Post by: worker201 on 13 September 2005, 23:04
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.
Title: Re: Microsoft tries to recruit Eric Raymond
Post by: davidnix71 on 14 September 2005, 02:34
"On the day *I* go to work for Microsoft, faint oinking sounds will be heard from far overhead, the moon will not merely turn blue but develop polkadots, and hell will freeze over so solid the brimstone will go superconductive.":D

and Windows will be bug free!
Title: Re: Microsoft tries to recruit Eric Raymond
Post by: Jack2000 on 14 September 2005, 02:55
YOu are not right man
i am going to work for M$ only to sabotage them and give out secret code thru
bbses :))
Title: Re: Microsoft tries to recruit Eric Raymond
Post by: jtpenrod on 21 September 2005, 06:55
I thought this was interesting:
Quote

#  David Keegel Says:
September 9th, 2005 at 1:08 am

Perhaps there was an opportunity missed here.
The email from Microsoft said:
\u201cI would be happy to answer any questions that you may have\u201d
Perhaps some questions like
When will Microsoft Office .DOC file format be published?
When will Internet Explorer be available to run on Linux?


The only point to making Internet Exlorer available to Linux would be so that it could suck on two platforms.
Title: Re: Microsoft tries to recruit Eric Raymond
Post by: Aloone_Jonez on 21 September 2005, 12:51
You mean three platforms, IE aready sucks on Windows and Mac but I see your point I don't think we want to see it giving head to Linux as well.
Title: Re: Microsoft tries to recruit Eric Raymond
Post by: worker201 on 21 September 2005, 19:19
I would love to see IE on Linux, just so I could take it apart, insert some really nasty code, and then give it to all my friends and family and university computers that still use IE.  That'll fucking teach them!
Title: Re: Microsoft tries to recruit Eric Raymond
Post by: Kintaro on 22 September 2005, 06:21
Quote from: worker201
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.
Title: Re: Microsoft tries to recruit Eric Raymond
Post by: piratePenguin on 22 September 2005, 19:12
Quote from: kintaro
however on a particular level I rather dislike the guy.
And what would that be?
Title: Re: Microsoft tries to recruit Eric Raymond
Post by: worker201 on 22 September 2005, 19:18
Quote from: kintaro
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".
Title: Re: Microsoft tries to recruit Eric Raymond
Post by: Kintaro on 23 September 2005, 01:37
Still he has quite the temper (http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/1999/04/msg00623.html), and he also is an egomaniac (http://slashdot.org/articles/03/06/08/1534249.shtml).

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/
Title: Re: Microsoft tries to recruit Eric Raymond
Post by: worker201 on 23 September 2005, 05:09
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.
Title: Re: Microsoft tries to recruit Eric Raymond
Post by: Kintaro on 23 September 2005, 12:43
More like 'self proclaimed' spokesperson for the open source movement.
Title: Re: Microsoft tries to recruit Eric Raymond
Post by: worker201 on 24 September 2005, 05:19
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.