Home › Authors › Eric S. Raymond
Eric S. Raymond Quotes
born 1957 United States
Eric S. Raymond (born December 4, 1957), often referred to by his initials ESR, is the author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar and the present maintainer of the Jargon File (also known as "The New Hacker's Dictionary").
United States Bloggers Critics Libertarians Programmers Also known as: Homesteading the Noosphere, The Art of Unix Programming, The Cathedral and the Bazaar
Random Eric S. Raymond quote
28 quotes
Android continues to stomp its competition flat. Even the post-Jobs Apple can't stem the tide; it's pretty close to the 10% niche market share I predicted back in 2009 already, with no sign that trend will or can be reversed.
It has been quite humorous watching the acolytes of the iPhone sink into deeper and deeper denial as Android blows through obstacles at ever-accelerating speed. It would require an epic poet, or perhaps a psychiatrist specializing in religious mania, to do full justice to this topic.
Ugly programs are like ugly suspension bridges: they're much more liable to collapse than pretty ones, because the way humans (especially engineer-humans) perceive beauty is intimately related to our ability to process and understand complexity. A language that makes it hard to write elegant code makes it hard to write good code.
People who make excuses for or actively advocate closed-source OSs and network software (and yes, Apple/iOS fanboys, I'm looking at you) are not merely harmlessly misguided cultists. They are enemies of liberty – enablers and accomplices before the fact in vendor schemes to spy on you, control you, and imprison you. Treat them, and the vendors they worship, accordingly.
Anybody who has ever owned a dog who barked when strangers came near its owner's property has experienced the essential continuity between animal territoriality and human property. Our domesticated cousins of the wolf are instinctively smarter about this than a good many human political theorists.
Homesteading the Noosphere (1998)
Emacs is undoubtedly the most powerful programmer's editor in existence. It's a big, feature-laden program with a great deal of flexibility and customizability. … Emacs has an entire programming language inside it that can be used to write arbitrarily powerful editor functions.
I use the word "hacker" in its correct and original sense: to describe a person who perceives computer programming as a kind of artistic passion, and who also is part of or identifies with the hacker culture, which is a group of programmers, historically, that has produced the Internet, Linux and the World Wide Web.
The Code (2001)
The 'noosphere' of this essay's title is the territory of ideas, the space of all possible thoughts. What we see implied in hacker ownership customs is a Lockean theory of property rights in one subset of the noosphere, the space of all programs. Hence 'homesteading the noosphere', which is what every founder of a new open-source project does.
Homesteading the Noosphere (1998)
Topics Eric S. Raymond is quoted on
Works