ESR is the Worst of All Time

Occasionally people mention Eric S Raymond's "work" and they don't seem to feel the vitriolic hate toward him that I do.  I worry sometimes that the hate is dying and I want to keep it alive.  Luckily I found a post by Cal Harding titled "Why I hate Eric Raymond" that accurately summarizes up my feelings on ESR so I don't have to write them down myself (it is difficult because of the hate).  One of his many great points:

 Eric describes himself as one of the most significant figures in the history of free software.  In his own words, "Today I'm one of the half-dozen or so most influential people in that movement; in fact, a lot of people would put me among the top three, with Linus Torvalds and Richard M. Stallman."

That's a very bold statement, and you would expect the person who makes it to be (in addition to an asshole) a talented coder who has authored software that can be listed alongside a kernel estimated to be worth $1.14 billion USD, or one of the most popular compilers on Earth.  However, probably Eric's primary contribution in the form of actual code is originally authoring the fetchmail utility: a mail client whose poor design and security holes have been criticized by, among others, one of my personal heroes, Daniel J. Bernstein.

More hubris: "I either founded or re-invented [...] the open source movement.  If that term means nothing to you, think Linux... "  I just love the subtle implication that Eric's actually had a direct and significant role in Linux development.  That's logic from the Steve Smith school of reasoning: "I've met Linus, Linus created Linux.  By the transitive property, I created Linux.  Algebra's awesome!"

In reality, though, Eric's main attempt at a contribution to the Linux kernel was in the form of CML2, a code configuration system, which was rejected by the kernel development team and the original CML was eventually replaced with LinuxKernelConf.  The possibility that it simply wasn't good enough being incomprehensible to him, Eric blamed the rejection on "politics." 

The only thing I'd add to Cal's statement is that I take ESR's act of "Fucking up the Jargon File" a bit personally since the original author was R. Finkel, the best professor of Computer Science I met while at the University of Kentucky.