What is ESR?

Erik Raymond ( Eric Steven Raymond ) was born on December 4, 1957. Become an active Internet user since 1970.
In general, it was a bit of a forced hobby, since in childhood he suffered from mild cerebral palsy. Known as ESR since 1998 since its introduction on Slashdot .

Slashdot

( Slashdot or /.) Is an English-language news site that specializes in technical and interesting technical topics. Most of the materials are sent by the readers themselves and published after verification by the editors. Any material has a discussion that often grows to huge sizes, turning into a flame . Slashdot works on its own CMS ( Slash ), specially modified to encourage meaningful comments and combat trolling . Slashdot was founded in September 1997 by Rob Malda (CmdrTaco), then acquired by VA Software . The site was actively developing, survived a large-scale trolling epidemic, and reached its peak of popularity in 2005, after which its popularity and the number of comments began to decline.

Slashdot effect : The neologism “to become slashdotted” (about the site) appeared in English, meaning that a particular site (mostly unknown) is unavailable as a result of posting a link to it on a popular site (for example, on Slashdot (note or on Habrahabr: ) and, as a result, an explosive increase in the number of visits to this site, which is why the equipment is not enough to show everyone to the site. In the Russian version it is sometimes referred to as “ Slashdot effect ” (we all know the habraeffect :).

Programmer, author of a whole heap of books and articles, as well as part-time lawyer specializing in the protection of open source software ( Open Source Software ). His name should be known to everyone familiar with the hacker culture. Raymond is the current editor and keeper of the Jargon File , an online encyclopedic dictionary dedicated to hacker slang and hacker culture. In addition, it was Raymond who in 2003 proposed using one of the figures of the game “Life” as the emblem of hackers .
Eric is one of the most important whales on which the open source movement was built and worth. This was mainly due to his publication on software development methods based on an analysis of the Linux kernel development process and personal experience of managing the open project fetchmail - " The Cathedral and the Bazaar ".

As a programmer, Eric worked on fetchmail , a number of libraries used in GNU \ Linux , the legendary Emacs, and other software products.
ESR finally formulated the " Linus Law ", which states that with a sufficient number of eyes all the errors lie on the surface. A deep mistake is one that is hard to find, but if there are enough people looking for mistakes, then they all become superficial. ESR 's views on open source are slightly different from those of Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman , they all share the ideology of open source, but if you briefly characterize their positions, the following goes: Linus and ESR differ on what is more important - openness of the code or “free” distribution of programs (Raymond is a supporter of “freedom”), well, Stallman, in general (imho), is completely against proprietary software.
Eric received 150,000 VA Linux shares, which were valued at $ 32 million on the day of the company's first public sale of shares ( IPO ), although exactly one year later, their value decreased by about 17 times .

VA Linux is currently called SourceForge, Inc.

In addition to his computer skills, Eric, as a versatile person, enjoys science fiction, firearms and martial arts (has a black belt in one of the varieties of taekwondo). Religiously ESR considers itself a neo-pagan. He is a supporter of the war in Iraq, regularly publishes his opinion on various political events in his blog .

Incomplete list of ESR publications:

• "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"
• "The Art of Unix Programming"
• “Take My Job, Please!”
• "Homesteading the Noosphere"
• "The Magic Cauldron"
• "Revenge of the Hackers"
• "The Unix Koans of Master Foo"

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PS My opinion is: ESR is not very well versed in politics and other dubious things :), but he is a great technical writer.

PPS Much of the above can be learned from the movie " Revolution OS " in it telling about the history, monetization and other. Here is a trailer for the Russian version of the film, and in general on Youtube there is a whole version in the English language, divided into 5 parts.


PPPS By preparation of article it was used.