ESR: Ego is for little people

Re:ESR: Ego is for little people by tptacek on Tuesday November 10, 2009 @10:56AM (#933250)

You can hardly use a browser, a cellphone, or a game console without relying on my code.

Any guesses? I'm pretty sure this phone doesn't use fetchmail.

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Re:ESR: Ego is for little people by jgrahamc on Tuesday November 10, 2009 @10:57AM (#933256)

I believe he's referring to the fact that he was at one time the maintainer of giflib (or libgif) and that he contributed some code to libpng. Since these are, he claims, vital to all those items you mention then we are all using his code.

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Re:ESR: Ego is for little people by davi on Tuesday November 10, 2009 @11:25AM (#933309)

That's right. People asked about this in the comments on the post. His answers are here:

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1404#comment-242133

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1404#comment-242156

Bottom line: libgif and libpng.

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Re:ESR: Ego is for little people by tptacek on Tuesday November 10, 2009 @11:57AM (#933397)

CompuServe described GIF, and then Gershon Elber and I made an open-source implementation that became ubiquitous

Worth noting that multiple years span the time between when Elber actually wrote giflib and when ESR added 2 functions and 3 utilities to it.

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Re:ESR: Ego is for little people by tptacek on Tuesday November 10, 2009 @11:01AM (#933264)

So, the guy who wrote libc strpbrk() then: an industry titan?

(Thanks for the answer though --- I think you're right).

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