The following letter was received from Eric S. Raymond, who has sent it to a number of Linux-related publications and mailing lists. It is presented verbatim. "After thirteen years as a loyal Red Hat and Fedora user, I reached my limit today, when an attempt to upgrade one package pitched me into a four-hour marathon of dependency chasing, at the end of which an attempt to get around a trivial file conflict rendered my system unusable."
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2005-09-20
Member since:2006-01-14
Member since:2006-07-07
Yes, ESR is a weird person. And I totally disagree with him on fireguns (he call's himself a "gun nut"). But some of his texts are actually very good, see the for example "A Brief History of Hackerdom" in O'Reillys open book "Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution", downloadable from http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/toc.html
And to be fair: He does not talk only - he has contributed code as well, see http://www.catb.org/~esr/software.html
Member since:2005-07-24
"""
And to be fair: He does not talk only - he has contributed code as well
"""
Contributed? He waltzes in, declares himself more experienced than the young dunderheads in charge, and starts trying to force code down the project's throat.
This is best demonstrated by doing a postmortem of those places where he has failed.
Search LKML for CLM2.
Watch how he sweeps in.
Watch how he condescends to the other, lesser, kernel hackers.
Watch how, in desperation, he does an end run around the normal process and tries to lobby Linus Torvalds in private.
And watch as his ill-conceived project, and he himself, is ejected from kernel development.
I watched the whole thing.
One day, I even plan to paint a representation:
"Eric Raymond's Expulsion From Paradise"
I'm not a great artist. So don't expect too much.
The Sistine Chapel's reputation is probably safe for now.
But OSS has grown far past the point where ESR is a major player.
If only he could grok that.
Edited 2007-02-21 18:18
Member since:2005-07-07
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2006-08-01
"And yet you probably believe in an invisible man in the clouds, people with wings and another man with horns. Christianity is no less absurd than paganism."
Thank you! Besides, why should ones religious preference dictate his worth as it relates to computers.
Another thing: I'd rather listen to someone who is involved in what the majority of the world consider to be weird rather than a bunch of people who do nothing but recite the same old tired scriptures like mindless drones.
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2005-10-02
The man with the horns? I believe I've seen here: http://www.freebsd.org/
He does exist 
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2006-07-16
"I don't trust anyone who believes in witches and fairy tales to tell me anything about computers."
What's scary is the number of people who believe in some all-powerful invisible entity that lives in a golden city in the sky surrounded by the souls of every single person in existence who died and a host of other winged people. Oh wait...a lot of the people who died went to that other fiery place because he did something like really satanic like marry someone of the same sex or rip up a picture of the pope on television.
Judgemental people with no common sense make me sick.
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2006-05-13
Neo pagans are more open minded than most Christian, Muslims or *** zealots. They don't try to convert the whole world either. They are more respectfull of life and they don't wage religious wars, murder each other about interpretations of the Bible or the Koran. They even don't even wage wars in Iraq because they think God told them to do so....
In other words, don't worry too much about his religious backgroud.
Member since:2006-08-09
Member since:2005-07-11
"Check this out from his wikepedia entry: Raymond identifies himself religiously as a neopagan, and is an initiate witch and coven leader. I don't trust anyone who believes in witches and fairy tales to tell me anything about computers. Particularly those that also just talk and don't code."
Well, many people have irrational beliefs and superstitions. Some people believe in witches and spirits and magic, some in fairies, some in fictitious almighty gods that created the earth 6000 years ago, some in Jesus' magic tricks, and some Moses' telekinetic powers, and much more.
I only wished everyone could think with step by step reasoning.
Just wait until AI comes along to imitate us...
Member since:2005-09-27
How does this relate to Fedora sucking. If you are going to judge a persons Point of View on Subject A because you disagree with his Point of View on unrelated Subject B. You are being quite stupid. Most people follow some sort of religion. Computers and Operating systems are actually not based in religion, at least most of them. You logic is the same as the people in the middle east. You cant trust that guy because he is not in my religion.
Member since:2006-08-09
), Nigeria, ...
Member since:2005-07-06
Check this out from his wikepedia entry: Raymond identifies himself religiously as a neopagan, and is an initiate witch and coven leader. I don't trust anyone who believes in witches and fairy tales to tell me anything about computers.
I know geeks generally don't have an emotional detector installed, but I think it is just possible that that might be a bit of a joke.
Member since:2005-08-18
The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.
PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.
Member since:
2005-11-14
Seriously, why does it matter what distro he uses?
Check this out from his wikepedia entry: Raymond identifies himself religiously as a neopagan, and is an initiate witch and coven leader. I don't trust anyone who believes in witches and fairy tales to tell me anything about computers. Particularly those that also just talk and don't code.