Well, I am too at the moment. He must have taken it down. I still have it open in my RSS reader. It was in response to this: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2433
Short answer is I think ESR was important in some areas. Cathedral and Bazaar in print was passed around at my office a lot - exposing a number of people I knew to the main ideas at the time. They may have been exposed to those ideas at some other time later on by someone else, but I think CatB was at least a small catalyst.
I was in no way involved with Open Source during this time period, but I think jgc undersells the importance of a "town crier". Having someone that can write well and clearly explain concepts is necessary to having an idea spread. Whether or not ESR drove the coding side of OSS, he is one of its best known publicizers.
ESR wrote the Art of Unix Programming and the Cathedral and the Bazaar. Both definitely influential, so props where it is due. Any org needs both dev and sales people to function, and ESR was a really good sales guy who was a pretty good dev too (not Linus or RMS, but still way better than most). Good sales guys are particularly rare in open source.
9 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 30.6 ms ] threadBecause I wanted wrapped lines.
Short answer is I think ESR was important in some areas. Cathedral and Bazaar in print was passed around at my office a lot - exposing a number of people I knew to the main ideas at the time. They may have been exposed to those ideas at some other time later on by someone else, but I think CatB was at least a small catalyst.