(...) Desperate for something to feed my jones, I snaffled my other sister's abandoned flute. And wow! I was a natural...immediately better with it than with the guitar I'd been hacking at for months. I was commuting to college at the time, and took it with me. I'd play as I walked between classes. Six weeks from a cold standing start I sat in with a professional jazz band for the first time...and they liked it. This was delightful but mystifying. All I'd had to do was learn to play a scale, and this amazing river of music poured forth with barely an effort on my part. It seemed almost as though my hands and lips had always known what to do, had been waiting for me to pick up the flute. (...) Until I realized, finally, belatedly, what had been happening to me. Until the Great God Pan reached out of my hindbrain and thundered "YOU!" And his gift is music and his chosen instruments the pipes and flutes. And his, too the power of joy; magic so strong that when it flowed out of me, even before I knew what I was doing, it amazed people into awe and incoherence and poetry. [1]
And worse: http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/sextips/bedplay.html
[1] Strong vibes of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CYF9Ge2JL0
The same isn't true of Eric Raymond.
(By "detriment" I'm referring to both design errors and numerous memory safety flaws resulting in remote code execution [1].)
[1]: http://pyropus.ca/software/getmail/faq.html#faq-about-why
What's problematic is presenting narrative history as if it were scientific, and also bad narrative history which diminishes rather than elevating the discourse around these events (which Eric Raymond's "great man history of computing [ps I'm the great man]" certainly does).
Large chunks of the security field seem to love nothing better than to have something to sneer at, but there's a grain of truth in that phrase too. Remember when that Rails vulnerability came out a while back? It was like blood in the water for the sharks, and a lot of people started looking for more. Critically, yes, they were also the right people to be looking at it, but the influx of people looking brought to light other things, making the whole system more secure.
* Which are shoplifted directly from Brooks or from the early Unix designers (Kernighan and Pike in particular).
* Which are banal results of simply reporting the zeitgeist he was writing in, or, worse, blinkered by a lack of insight into how large-scale closed-source commercial development was already working at the time.
* Which have not been borne out at all; for instance, many eyes making all bugs shallow.
* Which are really sneaky attempts to associate his minor work on fetchmail --- that "abomination before God" --- with major work like Linux.
I don't think the essay holds up. It is effectively written. Raymond is a capable verbal communicator. He can write a coherent sentence. But that's an awfully low bar to clear. In its substance, I think the essay is in fact "not good".
Regarding "Linus's law", you have to do better than observe that random users will find bugs in software and have done so repeatedly for open source software. You have to account for two additional details that Raymond is in no hurry to talk about:
1. The major vulnerabilities in open source software that were hidden in plain sight for years and years and only discovered by commercial security labs.
2. The effectiveness with which the same group of securing security nerds has shaken bugs out of closed source software, most notably that of Microsoft, Raymond's bete noir.
I think that's a bit too dismissive: he wrote effectively (as you say) and convincingly about free software in a way that no one else was doing at the time, and for an audience that was not just other hackers. That's pretty good in and of itself, even if he didn't have any brilliant insights.
I am obviously dismissive of Raymond. I think Raymond has been a terrible figurehead for open source. Due to my bias, my reading of "Cathedral" is that Raymond saw Linux getting a huge amount of attention and wrote an essay that is essentially "Me too, I wrote fetchmail".
I agree with that, but still think CATB was a pretty good paper: I don't think they're two completely exclusive concepts. Along the same lines, I respect some things about RMS and what he's done, and disagree strongly with others. He is also not a very good advocate for open source (err.. free software): perhaps that's why ESR got some traction - he was not great, but better than the others. At least he wasn't opposed to people making money to the point of personally offending them.
He clearly prioritizes narratives over analysis, with heroes and villains and truth and lies and good and evil and grand forces of history shaping the world in ways only he can perceive. If he was really serious about being a software historian, he would spent a lot less time in "I'm just telling you like it is, I've got a bibliography with citations and everything" mode, and a lot more time actively looking for evidence that refutes his claims in the interest of evolving his views. He would also use phrases like "us" and "them" and "elders of our tribe" and "I'm your worst nightmare" and "do you even know who I am?!?" a lot less often (like, never).
Once I noticed that he was basically writing a story in which he was his own Mary Sue [1], I could never unsee it. :( That sucked because I really did enjoy and learn from reading his stuff during the peak-ESR years of the mid-to-late-'90s.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Sue