I saw ESR once in a NY venue around 2000 in the middle of the bubble.
He was waving with a CD with newly open sourced banking software of some sort and raving about how all developers overarching goal will be to open source their work because don't care about money anymore, they already make so much.
Not very impressive then and not very impressive today.
>[...] Unfortunately, ESR would not accept patches for the mistaken
MX problem, nor for the preference order problem, nor for the
tunneled envelope information stripping problem. He seemed to
be too busy with speaking engagements, and has since declared
fetchmail to be in "maintenance mode", in order to demonstrate
a recognizable commercial software lifecycle for an Open Source
project, to give business the warm fuzzies.
Why did you write getmail? Why not just use fetchmail?
Short answer: … well, the short answer is mostly unprintable. The long answer is … well, long:
I do not like some of the design choices which were made with fetchmail. getmail does things a little differently, and for my purposes, better. In addition, most people find getmail easier to configure and use than fetchmail. Perhaps most importantly, getmail goes to great lengths to ensure that mail is never lost, while fetchmail (in its default configuration) frequently loses mail, causes mail loops, bounces legitimate messages, and causes many other problems.
When people have pointed out problems in fetchmail's design and implementation, it's maintainer has frequently ignored them, or (worse yet) gone in the completely wrong direction in the name of "fixing" the problems. For instance, fetchmail's configuration file syntax has been criticized as being needlessly difficult to write; instead of cleaning up the syntax, the maintainer instead included a GUI configuration-file-writing program, leading to comments like:
The punchline is that fetchmail sucks, even if it does have giddily-engineered whizbang configurator apps.
As an example, Dan Bernstein, author of qmail and other software packages, once noted to the qmail list:
Last night, root@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx reinjected thirty old messages from various authors to qmail@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
This sort of idiocy happens much more often than most subscribers know, thanks to a broken piece of software by Eric Raymond called fetchmail. Fortunately, qmail and ezmlm have loop-prevention mechanisms that stop these messages before they are distributed to subscribers. The messages end up bouncing to the wrong place, thanks to another fetchmail bug, but at least the mailing list is protected.
--D. J. Bernstein
The maintainer also ignored dozens of complaints about fetchmail's behaviour, stating (by fiat) that fetchmail was bug-free and had entered "maintenance mode", allowing him to ignore further bug reports.
But this is not the strongest language. Perhaps the most snarky response to fetchmail comes from Terry Lambert (docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=585008+0+archive/2001/freebsd-arch/20010218.freebsd-arch):
>As to fetchmail: it is an abomination before God. If someone in the press ever paid for an audit of the source code, the result would refute the paper "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" to such an extent that it could damage the Open Source movement, which has pinned so much on the paper, in ill-considered haste.
>ESR has constantly maintained that fetchmail is "not an MTA", and he is right: it could be, but it's not.
>When mail is delivered to a POP3 maildrop, envelope information is destroyed. To combat this, you would need to tunnel the envelope information in headers. Generally, sendmail does not support "X-Envelope-To:" because it exposes "Bcc:" recipients, since fetchmail-like programs generally _stupidly_ do not strip such headers before local re-injection of the email. Without this information, it can not recover the intended recipient of the email. The fetchmail program delivers this mail to "root".
>The program has another bug, even if you elect single message delivery (in order to ensure a "for <user@domain>" in the "Received:" timestamp line. The bug is that it assumes the machine from which the download is occurring is a valid MX for your domain.... [pld: the end result is misaddressed replies]
...
>Unfortunately, ESR would not accept patches for the mistaken MX problem, nor for the preference order problem, nor for the tunneled envelope information stripping problem. He seemed to be too busy with speaking engagements, and has since declared fetchmail to be in "maintenance mode", in order to demonstrate a recognizable commercial software lifecycle for an Open Source project, to give business the warm fuzzies.
When I hear about ESR nowadays, it's usually in the context of extreme right-wing politics. I'm not sure whether that's an accurate description of the man or a smear campaign against him.
That said, if you dig into the Jargon File on catb.org, you can find some interesting descriptions of how ESR perceived his hacker[0] community.
[0]Notably, his "hackers" are computer programmers from the ARPANET, USENET, and 1990s Internet cultures. Not cybercriminals or Silicon Valley startup founders.
I've known ESR (aka "Eric the Flute") and RMS (Richard Stallman) since the early 1980's, and batshit crazy smarmy arrogant self-aggrandizing sexist racist anti-black homophobic Islamophobic neocon interventionist libertarian gun nut is a fair and accurate description of ESR's politics. "Yonder Racism" is an ironically accurate anagram of his name.
The only "smear campaign" is his own long term war against the FSF institutionally, RMS personally, and the concept of Free Software itself: he's built his entire career on trying to tear down RMS's life work, while misappropriating and corrupting RMS's original ideas as his own.
But the code ESR has written himself is mediocre and lackluster at best, and trivial and unimportant in comparison to RMS's. (Ask him why he never shipped let alone shared the source code of his unfinished magnum dopeus Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtle NetNews Reader, which he would drone on and on about endlessly and insufferably to people he cornered at science fiction conventions in the 80's, but never finished or released or shared with any bazaar or cathedral.)
He certainly doesn't deserve to be called a hacker, let alone presume to define the meaning of the term. Real hackers from the MIT-AI lab where it originated consider his revisionist politically slanted rewriting-for-profit of the Hacker's Dictionary to be disrespectful parasitical vandalism that doesn't represent the actual hacker culture, just a tool he hijacked, corrupted, and abused to spread his right-wing political ideology.
He made up the ridiculous "many eyes" quote himself, then misnamed it "Linus's Law" to avoid personal responsibility and shift the blame to innocent Linus Torvalds, who never said such a stupid thing, and which HeartBleed and many other eyeballable bugs proved terribly wrong and misguided. About which the salty security expert Theo de Raadt famously said "Oh right, let's hear some of that "many eyes" crap again. My favorite part of the "many eyes" argument is how few bugs were found by the two eyes of Eric (the originator of the statement). All the many eyes are apparently attached to a lot of hands that type lots of words about many eyes, and never actually audit code."
Anything good you've heard about him comes from his own mouth shamelessly and braggadociously bloviating about himself. You can set your watch by his flying monkeys, GamerGate incels, and bulging-at-the-seams electroluminescent spandex clad Tron Guy Jay Maynard swooping in to defend him and downvote brigade any criticism. (I shit you not, Tron Guy is literally and figuratively his biggest fan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0avXmif6Ts )
If that video didn't make you throw up in your mouth, then I could sicken you by linking to examples and posting pages of his reprehensible racist quotes, but I'll leave it at that, and anyone else who cares can google it and find out for themselves. Thanks to our own hn contributor ptacek, people have actually donated tens of thousands of dollars to charity NOT to see his many quotes like "what’s keeping women in general from occupying the vast middle of the programming field is not general intelligence. On the other hand, the average black American has an IQ about 85 and that is pretty much a disqualifier right there. Only the cohort of their bell curve above 3 STDs from median has much hope of matching the capability of the average white programmer", so you'll thank me later for not posting more of them here.
>Raymond has claimed that "Gays experimented with unfettered promiscuity in the 1970s and got AIDS as a consequence", and that "Police who react to a random black male behaving suspiciously who might be in the critical age range as though he is an near-imminent lethal threat, are being rational, not racist." A progressive campaign, "The Great Slate", was successful in raising funds for candidates in part by asking for contributions from tech workers in return for not posting similar quotes by Raymond. Matasano Security employee and Great Slate fundraiser Thomas Ptacek said, "I've been torturing Twitter with lurid Eric S. Raymond quotes for years. Every time I do, 20 people beg me to stop." It is estimated that, as of March 2018, over $30,000 has been raised in this way.
Hey Don? I've seen this post of yours more than once, so I'm assuming you've got it saved somewhere, ready to go whenever the Flute gets mentioned. I don't disagree with anything you've written here, but I am curious if there was a last straw for you that makes you post this every time his name comes up.
Since you asked: To be honest, the last straw was probably his intensely sour body odor and lack of hygiene the last time he cornered me at a science fiction convention in the 1980's to relentlessly yap about his Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle NetNews Reader. I had no premonition of how blatantly racist and off the rails looney tunes he would become in the wake of 9/11, but even back then he left quite a strong impression, and my lizard brain just can't shake recalling the visceral olfactory memory of his fetid bouquet associated with his self aggrandizing pontifications about software design.
It doesn't help that his infamous "Sex Tips for Geeks" essay comes off like it was written by Pepé Le Pew.
From both the Rational Wiki, and from vaguely remembered Slashdot comments from 20+ years ago, I thought that ESR's 'The Art of Unix Programming' was regarded as pretty good.
I'm curious if this is accurate, because it would seem to be out of character.
It's pretty clearly the best thing he's done. CATB has just not held up at all; it's actively bad, and it has a weirdly outsized reputation. But of someone posted an AoUP link instead, I'd shut up about it.
It did however persuade the Mozilla Organization to open-source their browser, and if they had not open-sourced it, then Firefox would never have been created (being a fork created by outsiders of Mozilla's browser).
At least one of the people in the room when the decision was made has said that CATB was what persuaded the execs.
1. Yes, CatB was waved around (not sure that the most ardent wavers actually read it) inside Netscape in late 1997 as a gesture to support the argument for doing mozilla dot org.
It helped get some execs on the bandwagon, but Eric Hahn was the biggest high level executive proponent, and I think he genuinely wanted an escape pod, and possibly thereby a better ending, for Netscape via open source. That's what we who actually founded mozilla dot org then did.
2. Firefox was not a "fork", it started as a new project named "mozilla/browser" built on common code. David Hyatt and Blake Ross created it from the cross-platform toolkit (XPFE, XUL) that we'd all worked on at Netscape (Hyatt was there until jumping to Apple in 2001; Blake was intern out of high school on way to Stanford).
The m/b => Phoenix team were fans of Mike Judge's OFFICE SPACE (1999); we hung out on an IRC channel named #me-in-the-ass and plotted (successfully) how to show up idiot upper management at the Netscape division of AOL, by doing a small, fast, customizable browser, while said management bloated and dithered over the "Netscape 4.5" and doomed 5.0 suite of browser/mail/news/editor/etc.
>When Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale cited Raymond's 'Cathedral and the Bazaar' essay as a major influence upon the company's decision, the company instantly elevated Raymond to the level of hacker celebrity. Determined not to squander the opportunity, Raymond traveled west to deliver interviews, advise Netscape executives, and take part in the eventual party celebrating the publication of Netscape Navigator's source code.
Just like Rudy Giuliani traveled south to the party at Mar-a-Lago, determined not to squander his own opportunity at celebrity, fame, and respect in the wake of a noun, a verb, and 9/11!
