
Eric S. Raymond's Patreon Campaign: I build things you use every day - miiiiiike
https://www.patreon.com/esr
======
luckydude
ESR has always been self promoting but wow, this takes the cake. I can think
of many many people who are far more deserving of patronage than Eric. Has he
written a networking stack? A VM system? A file system? In terms of system
stuff he's not done much that I've seen.

I'm not saying he has no value but if you viewed this as an investment in
systems software I predict the ROI is going to disappoint. If you want to
support him for some other reason, go for it.

He's done some stuff, one thing I still use is his rewrite of the pic manual,
we share a love for that little language. And he's done lots of little Unix
like tools for fairly obscure problems.

But systems programming? That's my wheelhouse and he's never been considered a
part of that crowd by the systems people I know. Systems people benchmark
themselves against the original unix people (if you are old enough) or Linus
or Cantrill or someone similar. In my opinion, ESR is definitely not a peer of
those people. Doesn't make him not useful but it's a big stretch for him to be
claiming to be a systems programmer. Have to wonder what Linus would say if

------
deepnet
Eric Raymond's words helped change the world (Cathedral essay). He inspires me
every time I read his work, sometimes I disagree, often agree, usually both
but he never fails to get me thinking in new ways.

IMHO Eric is one of the elders and I pay tithe to this man who I respect and
learn from. I value his forthrightness, especially in these times of chilling
effects - he head is firmly above the parapet and of course he takes flak.

Eric's list of Open Source & Free Software contributions
[http://www.catb.org/esr/software.html](http://www.catb.org/esr/software.html)

For me personally, it is an honour and a priviledge to be on the same planet
at the same time as Eric S Raymond - super stoked to fund his work - his work
merits it.

Eric on the Cathedral & Bazaar from the browser wars (when M$ nearly pwnd the
net)
[https://youtu.be/jw8K460vx1c?t=38m30s](https://youtu.be/jw8K460vx1c?t=38m30s)

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chx
> Every time you use a Web browser, locate yourself on Google Maps, draw money
> from an ATM, or play on a game console, you rely on computer code I wrote
> and gave away.

I am puzzled. What does he refer to?
[http://thyrsus.com/gitweb/](http://thyrsus.com/gitweb/) there's nothing here
that resembles a network stack, the Wikipedia page doesn't mention anything.
[https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/CREDITS](https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/CREDITS)
mentions him as the ncurses co-maintainer and terminfo master file maintainer.
What am I ignorant of here?

~~~
y_g
Eric's ego is apparently way ahead of his actual self-promotion skills. If
he's so important to everything, why hasn't he been on staff at red hat or the
linux foundation or google or some such for the last, oh, 15+ years?

Also, _most_ of the functionality behind all of the services he names is
implemented by people doing regular jobs at technology companies.

~~~
meric

        "The Internet was built by people like me." - Eric S. Raymond
    

I guess that's kind of like if Tim Berners-Lee said:

    
    
        "I built the internet."
    

Maybe this author can fit some Eric S. Raymond's content into his blog post:

[http://james-iry.blogspot.com.au/2009/05/brief-incomplete-
an...](http://james-iry.blogspot.com.au/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-mostly-
wrong.html)

If Eric S. Raymond doesn't spend wastefully, he should still have tens of
millions:

[http://www.zdnet.com/article/eric-raymond-how-ill-spend-
my-m...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/eric-raymond-how-ill-spend-my-millions/)

He's a great software engineer, but I didn't like the tone of this campaign
for monthly donations either.

~~~
segmondy
I was going to ask what happened to his VA Linux money, but then again, it was
stock valuation. How much did he cash out before the 2000 bust?

------
deepnet
"NTPsec - improving Internet time service Published Aug 20, 2015

[http://www.ntpsec.org/](http://www.ntpsec.org/)

Today it can be revealed that I am one of the principal developers of NTPsec,
which has been quietly ramping up over the last eight months and aims to field
an improved and (especially!) more secure Internet time service.

Welcome to the NTP Security Project. Our goal is to create a safe, reliable
NTP server that is community based and decentralised with multiple
contributors and maintainers."

\-- looks like Eric has this particular work in mind.

