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this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2024
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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no part of me is surprised that every famous FOSS personality has a ridiculously bad age of consent take, but it is a real fucking problem that this keeps happening
You're being perhaps too generous to consider ESR a famous FOSS personality.
He's definitely up there, or at least used to be. The Cathedral and the Bazaar, his attempt to justify why Linux is more successful than GNU or BSD, used to be very much a part of the open source canon. He cofounded OSI. He forked some POP3 client to make his own bad and insecure one called Fetchmail, then refused to improve it.
Personally I'm happy to know he's become less relevant nowadays.
Emphasis on used to. He worked fairly hard at becoming a household name, but ultimately his fame was pretty brief. Stallman achieved meme status, love him or hate him. Torvalds actually ships shit people use. There's just no discourse around Raymond these days, good or bad.
Every once in a while someone trips over one of the pitons he's driven into the wall of FOSS to try and climb it, discovers his abysmal takes, amd everyone promptly forgets about him again.
dunno, it’s definitely up there. maybe not a recent one, and I could understand people sub-25 perhaps not knowing the name, but across a fair bit of the foss space the name is household
unfortunately
Yes, he even gets mentioned by xkcd in the same breath as Stallman or Linus. (That it turns out the latter is the least worse of the three (he actually realized that being an asshole was bad) is quite the surprise).
That was way back in 2007. Probably close to when I read his stuff... but even then he was clearly still clinging to the Halloween Letters and seemed extremely old school.