Eric S. Raymond is a developer. But not just any developer. He’s an open source developer. In this blog post, he explains why he hates proprietary software. The reason, back in the late 70’s proprietary software seemingly raped him. At least, that’s the way his blog post reads.
From 1979 to 1985, and then briefly in 1988-89, I was a component in the proprietary-software system of production. In that world, the working programmer’s normal experience includes being forced to use broken tools for political reasons, insane specifications, and impossible deadlines.
Naturally, being a cog in the wheel is proprietary software’s fault and not the bureaucracy of the company you worked for. Good thing now that he escaped their clutches he doesn’t have to use broken tools anymore; its smooth sailing with GNU tools from now on.
Long days, long nights and at the end of it all some guy in a suit owns all that work, owns the children of your mind, owns a piece of you.
A piece you can never get back, no matter how hard you scrub!
We were suffocating, being ground down into unfeeling cogs taught by repeated pain that we must not care about our art because to care was to lose.
For some great examples of Eric S. Raymond’s art, have a look at Fetchmail which was amateurishly build and panned by most of the FOSS community as being total hell to work with.
Some of us, including me, dreamed of completely “free” software environments before the public launch of FSF not for abstract moral reasons or because of some soi-disant social problem, but because the conditions of our craft were intolerable to us.
So basically, Eric went to the fair, got scared by a clown, and now he hates the rides at the fair because that’s also where the clown sometimes is? Sounds like air-tight logic.
it took me years after I’d escaped to understand that I had a right to feel angry about how I had been used, and many of my peers never figured that out at all.
He acts like he’s the first person to have a bad job, let alone a bad white collar job.
Imagine reading a blog post by a 14 year old kid complaining about how Burger King practically raped them. That’s basically how whiny Eric’s post is, but you don’t hear the Burger King “sufferers” claiming they’re going to form their own “free” fast food restaurant, do you?
Comments
What’s with the FOSS community and their serious inability to make coherently logical statements? What the hell does his lousy working conditions have to do with open-source? It’s an attack on corporatism if anything, but FOSS and corporatism are not mutually exclusive, or else Red Hat and Canonical wouldn’t exist.
I was wondering when this was going to show up here.
The guy must have got a paper cut while shoving a design document up his ass.
I’m really having problems with this. I just can’t help it. Every time I see the (nonsensical) word “fetchmail,” I read it as “felchmail.”
(Wonder if the Django censor will let me get away with that one?)
Love the Burger King analogy. “Free as in Mad Cow Disease?”
I’m also impressed by Eric’s rare foray into poesy. “Children of the mind?” There may be windmills up there, but children? I beg leave to doubt that.
(Oh, and I’m still standing by my suggestion that Janis Joplin invented the Free Software movement with her classic “Me and Bobby McGee”)
You must be signed in to leave comments.