eric raymond the cathedral and the bazaar

My concern is the larger issues Raymond raises, which are too important to leave his claims unchallenged - especially since they are not going away. For this reason, if I seem to be defending the Ada Initiative, I do so only as a side effect of debunking Raymond. I am not a fan of the The Ada Initiative, having resigned early from its advisory board and criticized it frequently. However, because Raymond has prior credibility, his claims are being listened to, and recently I have heard them repeated - and not just by obvious members of the men's rights movement.

Unless a stand is taken, he insists, 'we will betray not only what is best in our own traditions but the entire civilization that we serve.'Ĭoming from anyone else, such accusations would be ignored, or at the most laughed at until they faded from memory.

This attitude makes the activists the 'enemy' of open source, and Raymond hints that such distractions from coding threaten the infrastructure of the Internet, for which open source is largely responsible. In the second blog, Raymond explains 'Why Hackers Must Eject the SJWs.' His claim is that social activists want to replace the meritocracy that supposedly prevails in open source with affirmative action and the politics of victimhood. His evidence for these assertions is what is supposed to be a chat log with the name of the informant hidden. Raymond and his source suggest that men in open source take note, and never be alone with a woman at technical conferences.

In particular, members of this alleged cabal are supposed to have made 'multiple runs' at Linus Torvalds. Now, after lying low for over a decade, Raymond is getting attention again, this time for two blog entries in which he rants about how so-called Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) threaten open source.Īccording to Raymond's first blog on the subject, he has heard from an anonymous source that members of The Ada Initiative, a recently closed non-profit intended to promote women in computing, are trying to entrap prominent men in open source so that they can lay accusations of sexual harassment. His essay and book, The Cathedral and the Bazaar was obligatory reading for executives trying to understand open source. Raymond was one of the philosophical leaders of open source. Around the start of the millennium, Eric S.

Eric raymond the cathedral and the bazaar