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Eric S. Raymond
Summary
Eric Steven Raymond (born December 4, 1957), often referred to as ESR, is an American software developer, open-source software advocate, and author of the 1997 essay and 1999 book The Cathedral and the Bazaar. He wrote a guidebook for the Roguelike game NetHack. In the 1990s, he edited and updated the , published as The New Hacker's Dictionary.
Raymond was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1957 and lived in Venezuela as a child. His family moved to Pennsylvania in 1971. He developed cerebral palsy at birth; his weakened physical condition motivated him to go into computing.
Raymond began his programming career writing proprietary software, between 1980 and 1985. In 1990, noting that the had not been maintained since about 1983, he adopted it, but not without criticism; Paul Dourish maintains an archived original version of the Jargon File, because, he says, Raymond's updates "essentially destroyed what held it together."
In 1996 Raymond took over development of the open-source email software "popclient", renaming it to Fetchmail. Soon after this experience, in 1997, he wrote the essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", detailing his thoughts on open-source software development and why it should be done as openly as possible (the "bazaar" approach). The essay was based in part on his experience in developing Fetchmail. He first presented his thesis at the annual Linux Kongress on May 27, 1997. He later expanded the essay into a book, The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary, in 1999. The essay has been widely cited. The internal white paper by Frank Hecker that led to the release of the Mozilla (then Netscape) source code in 1998 cited The Cathedral and the Bazaar as "independent validation" of ideas proposed by Eric Hahn and Jamie Zawinski. Hahn would later describe the 1999 book as "clearly influential".
From the late 1990s onward, due in part to the popularity of his essay, Raymond became a prominent voice in the open source movement.
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