Rather disturbing, yet perfectly typical.

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:

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.

Wikipedia points out:

>In Facts and Fallacies about Software Engineering, Robert Glass refers to the law as a "mantra" of the open source movement, but calls it a fallacy due to the lack of supporting evidence and because research has indicated that the rate at which additional bugs are uncovered does not scale linearly with the number of reviewers; rather, there is a small maximum number of useful reviewers, between two and four, and additional reviewers above this number uncover bugs at a much lower rate. While closed-source practitioners also promote stringent, independent code analysis during a software project's development, they focus on in-depth review by a few and not primarily the number of "eyeballs".

And then there's the fact that Eric Raymond had the nerve to name and blame the "law" on Linus instead of taking "credit" for it himself.

And of course he also has the nerve to attempt to defend his "law", after we've just gone through three HUGE security holes in open source software that would have been discovered long ago, if only "Linus's Law" were true. On his blog, he constructs a straw man argument that "proprietary software is worse than open source software", which does not in any way support his claim about "all bugs being shallow".

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5665

Nor does he address many of the valid points that people raise, in the wikipedia article itself I just quoted, or that people raised in response to his blog posting.

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.)

Eric Raymond's standard technique is to stonewall and ignore valid criticism, while viciously attacking his critics. You can see that behavior consistently applied in most of his blog postings, comments, public statements and publications.

An archetypical example is his mean spirited name-calling defense of Russell Nelson, who was acting as President of the Open Source Initiative, a position that Raymond had just been kicked out of because his divisive in-fighting and life-long jihad against Richard Stallman was embarrassing them and damaging their reputation -- Russell was his replacement: OOPS!

After having been appointed President, Russell Nelson posted a blog entry entitled "Blacks are lazy", which of COURSE drew a lot of criticism, because it was obvious race baiting, and riddled with logical fallacies and racist bigoted presumptions. Russell expressed that it was "poor writing" and withdrew the blog posting, and resigned his position as President of the Open Source Initiative.

The original blog posting can be seen in the comments section of his wikipedia page, so you can draw your own conclusions:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Russ_Nelson#Blacks_are_la...

Russell agreed with his critics that his blog posting was wrong -- although as to HOW wrong, he still disagrees with most critics, and he's generalized his argument to "everyone is lazy" and has characterized the criticism of him as "slander":

http://blog.russnelson.com/economics/blacks-are-lazy.html

So, now that I've explained the background, I will demonstrate what I mean by how Eric Raymond typically constructs his arguments to support his political agenda, by ignoring valid criticism and turning it around on the critic by calling people names:

Even though Russell agreed the article was badly written, took it down, and voluntarily resigned, Eric demanded that OSI not only SUPPORT Russell, but waste their precious money, time, energy and reputation FIGHTING a BATTLE based on his own extreme right-wing libertarian "principles" against Russell's critics (who he called "FOOLS" and "THUGS"), which had NOTHING at all to do with open source software:

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Linux-and-Open-Source/New-OSI-Presi...

“The people who knew Russ as a Quaker, a pacifist and a gentleman, and no racist, but nevertheless pressured OSI to do the responsible thing and fire him in order to avoid political damage should be equally ashamed,” Raymond said. “Abetting somebody elses witch hunt is no less disgusting than starting your own.”

"Personally, I wanted to fight this on principle," Raymond said. "Russ resigned the presidency rather than get OSI into that fight, and the board quite properly respected his wishes in the matter. That sacrifice makes me angrier at the fools and thugs who pulled him down."

Since both Eric Raymond and Russell Nelson lost their leadership positions as President of the Open Source Initiative because of their bigoted, racist, divisive and very public beliefs, you can guess which side of the Brendan Eich controversy they came down on:

"My first thought on hearing of the resignation of Brendan Eich as CEO of Mozilla: Congratulations, gay activists. You have become the bullies you hate.﻿" -Eric Raymond

And this from the same self avowed "cheerful gun nut" who threatened Bruce Perens:

https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1999/04/msg00197.html

"Damn straight I took it personally. And if you ever again behave like that kind of disruptive asshole in public, insult me, and jeopardize the interests of our entire tribe, I'll take it just as personally -- and I will find a way to make you regret it. Watch your step."

Bruce Perens Dead
http://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/archive/bruce-perens-dead

Anyway, back to the criticism of TAoUP and Raymond's other technical claims to fame and self aggrandizing Autohagiography:

Everything he writes is deeply tainted with his one-sided partisan ideology and narcissistic self promotion, which is not just limited to Microsoft bashing, but to extreme right wing libertarian politics and guns. You can see that by the changes he made to the "Hacker's Dictionary", and you can see that in everything else he writes.

I've posted some typical reviews of the book in the other message.