When TCD's Internet Society went to advertise his talk there last week the only headline on the poster was the letters ESR in 240point type. It was enough, and there was standing room only in the lecture hall. Before he began he asked how many people present wrote software for a living. A show of hands said almost half. These days his world audience is not just the true hackers who knocked the Internet into existence over the last 30 years.
Major companies are among the most rapt listeners.
They listen because he is their contact with the hackers and what they have achieved. Listening to him may help to achieve the same quality, resilience and flexibility in their corporate computing projects that ESR's tribe, the hackers, have achieved in theirs. In fact, he reckons that collaboration of the kind that built the Linux operating system is the only way forward for most major software projects. That model has made Microsoft's Bill Gates the richest man in America. Open-source, on the other hand, depends on voluntary work by many programmers collaborating over the Internet.