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A comment on Eric Raymond's 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar' Turns 19. Parent comment

Re:Eric Raymond's 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar' Turns 19 by tptacek on Tuesday May 24, 2016 @03:07PM (#11764585)
I get why you say that, but my take is that nobody else was doing it at the time because "open source" had just entered the zeitgeist, and it wasn't Raymond who put it there; it was Linus Torvalds --- which is why Raymond keeps referencing him in ways that make it clear his audience is already familiar.

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".

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Re:Eric Raymond's 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar' Turns 19 by davidw on Tuesday May 24, 2016 @03:38PM (#11764843)
> I think Raymond has been a terrible figurehead for open source.

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.

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