I'm not afraid of Eric S Raymond ripping my head off, and I certainly didn't create him. He did make a death threat to Bruce Perens, but never followed through with it, and has been mercilessly mocked and ridiculed about it ever since.

https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/1999/04/msg00623.html

The irony of Eric S Raymond threatening someone else for behaving "like that kind of disruptive asshole in public" is rich -- very rich.

Bruce Perens Dead:

https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/cat/bruce-perens/page/10

https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/cat/bruce-perens/page/7

https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/archive/terrorismistic

I've known ESR for at least 35 years, and he hasn't changed from being a smarmy jerk, he's just gotten much worse, especially after 9/11, when his racism and islamophobia and violent death threats really started erupting. But he's always been deeply sexist, for as long as I've known him.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond

>"And for any agents or proxy of the regime interested in asking me questions face to face, I’ve got some bullets slathered in pork fat to make you feel extra special welcome." -Eric S Raymond

>"A clash of civilizations driven by the failure of Islamic/Arab culture (though I would stress the problem of the Islamic commandment to jihad more than he does). I think he [Steven den Beste] is also right to say that our long-term objective must be to break, crush and eventually destroy this culture, because we can't live on the same planet with people who both carry those memes and have access to weapons of mass destruction. They will hate us and seek to destroy us not for what we've done but for what we are." -Eric S Raymond

>"In the U.S., blacks are 12% of the population but commit 50% of violent crimes; can anyone honestly think this is unconnected to the fact that they average 15 points of IQ lower than the general population? That stupid people are more violent is a fact independent of skin color." -Eric S Raymond

>"When I hear the words "social responsibility", I want to reach for my gun." -Eric S Raymond

And in all that time he's never written any impressive code, nor performed any noteworthy hacks, he just talks and talks and talks. He has made his entire career out of trying to tear down RMS and the Free Software Foundation, not doing anything constructive.

One good example of the problem with his "technical" works and his lack of actual experience with the things he likes to talk about so much, is that he makes and promotes outrageously incorrect claims like Linus's Law, which ESR confabulated himself, but misleadingly attributed "in honor of" Linus Torvalds, who never said that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus's_Law

"Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."

When in fact:

Given ANY number of eye, "all" bugs are NOT shallow.

Some bugs are NEVER "shallow".

And only a FEW eyes are qualified to see some bugs, while MANY eyes are totally unqualified, including his own:

His mouth is certainly not qualified to make sweeping generalizations about "all" bugs, given his lack of experience as a programmer, and his spectacular public failure at auditing code in his pathetic attempt to discredit the now-exonerated scientists whose code predicted global warming (described below).

Neither "enough eyeballs" nor "the right eyeballs" are a GIVEN, even for open source software.

"Not enough eyeballs" (or "ZERO eyeballs" as he loves to claim) are NOT a GIVEN for proprietary software, because you can license much proprietary source code, and some proprietary source code is available for you to read and audit for free, under licenses like Microsoft's "Shared Source" license.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_source

And qualified eye balls are NOT FREE, and usually very busy being well paid to look at much more interesting things than poorly written buggy code like OpenSSL. I doubt that Eric Raymond has contributed any of the profits from his books or VA Linux stocks to Theo De Raadt or anyone else who actually takes the long time and tedious effort to actually audit code.

To quote Theo De Raadt: “My favorite part of the “many eyes” argument is how few bugs were found by the two eyes of Eric (the originator of the statement). All the many eyes are apparently attached to a lot of hands that type lots of words about many eyes, and never actually audit code.”

The little experience Raymond DOES have auditing code has been a total fiasco and embarrassing failure, since his understanding of the code was incompetent and deeply tainted by his preconceived political ideology and conspiracy theories about global warming, which was his only motivation for auditing the code in the first place. His sole quest was to discredit the scientists who warned about global warming. The code he found and highlighted was actually COMMENTED OUT, and he never addressed the fact that the scientists were vindicated.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond

>During the Climategate fiasco, Raymond's ability to read other peoples' source code (or at least his honesty about it) was called into question when he was caught quote-mining analysis software written by the CRU researchers, presenting a commented-out section of source code used for analyzing counterfactuals as evidence of deliberate data manipulation. When confronted with the fact that scientists as a general rule are scrupulously honest, Raymond claimed it was a case of an "error cascade," a concept that makes sense in computer science and other places where all data goes through a single potential failure point, but in areas where outside data and multiple lines of evidence are used for verification, doesn't entirely make sense. (He was curiously silent when all the researchers involved were exonerated of scientific misconduct.)