My opinion of him isn't too high. He likes to brandy himself about as some sort of hacker hero, but in truth, he's not really contributed much to OSS. Combined with him standing up a packed audience at my college without even bothering to call and cancel, and general nutjobery (see his rants about guns or mysticism) I'm somewhat less than a fan.
We need wackos like Stallman. He's a little south of sanity, but damn, he's slung a lot of code and really changed the landscape of technology with his idealism.
> My opinion of him isn't too high. He likes to brandy himself about as some sort of hacker hero, but in truth, he's not really contributed much to OSS.
OSS ESR has been involved in or founded:
Fetchmail,
GPSd,
CML2,
The Cathedral and the Bazaar,
The Jargon File,
Terminfo/Termcap,
VC Mode/GUB in Emacs (ESR is the second biggest lisp contributor to Emacs after RMS),
Contribs to Gnuplot, Gnome, Python, Groff and Nethack,
GNU Toolkit SED,
Hexdump,
gif2png,
Bogofilter,
Countless Howtos at the LDP
With the exception of the above, you're right he's not contributed much to OSS. I'm not saying ESR's not a polarising person (I've met both ESR and RMS, both can be black and white people) but he has contributed a lot to OSS.
As noted below, his versions (or contributions) to most of those software projects were all pretty trivial. And listing "projects" like hexdump is kind of cute -- it's 211 lines of code.
The one claim that stood out there -- the one that gave a really testable statement that would have surprised me if true was, "ESR is the second biggest lisp contributor to Emacs after RMS". I thought, hey, there'd be a surprise, so I decided to run cvstat on the emacs lisp subdir:
- RMS contributed the 2nd most code to Emacs' Lisp with 217542 lines of changes.
- ESR contributed the 39th most code to Emacs' Lisp with 6367 lines of changes.
The reason that I don't like the guy so much is because he claims to speak for a movement, that by his own prognostication is a meritocracy, and I don't feel like he has the credibility for that. Combined with the fact that I think a lot of what he says is bozo-riffic, I'd prefer him step back from his self-appointed spokesman position.
Pretty much. Most influential wackos tend to be single minded about some ideological point. Sometimes that gets them a peace prize, other times it involves invading neighboring countries. ;-)
I've talked to him. It's amusing. And inspiring. And a little frustrating. At least as of a couple years ago he'd still interrupt you every single time you said "Linux" to stick a "GNU" in there.
That's a long list, but most of them are toys, scripts or quick hacks. Even the ones that almost look significant at first glance -- i.e. bogofilter or sed -- not so much.
His version of bogofilter was 900 lines of code and his version of sed 1700. I'd guess that the total amount of code that he's written that gets packaged for a standard Linux distribution is maybe 5k LOC. That's being generous, honestly. And that's what I find disingenuous when he's busy talking about his prolific OSS background.
The comments about Stallman's sanity weren't meant to be taken literally. I assumed that was obvious.
Ok, you don't think that's much code/of very high quality/of much usefulness . . . very well, I now respectfully ask you to tell us how much/of what quality/how useful code YOU have contributed.
We need wackos like Stallman. He's a little south of sanity, but damn, he's slung a lot of code and really changed the landscape of technology with his idealism.