Has ne one read this book by Eric S. Raymond?.... I would like to know some of your opinions on it... or even your opinions on the man himself.....

ESR sucks. Don't listen to him. He is a gun toting hic. The only thing he cares about is the superior development model of Free Software...the politics are more important than the development model. This is why I don't like Open Source. That said, the cathedral and the bazaar are probably an ok read, but none of ESR's ideas have worked out in the real world (1. Write Open Source, 2. ???. 3. Profit; no one knows what step 2 is).

http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/

If anyone wants to read Raymond's writings including TCatB. I haven't read TCatB yet but it is suppose to be good. His ideas might not be exactly right but at least he is presenting ideas instead of just making wild acqusations about people.

Well, he watered down Free Software and created Open Source. This has been the single worst thing for the Free Software movement/GNU. Open Source was started in 1998 (which just happens to be about the time I learned about GNU/Linux and whatnot) and is basically Free Software without the philosophy. The Free Software movement is more a political one than a technical one--I'd rather use technically inferior but more Free software than superior proprietary software. If I want to make the software better, I can do it myself or pay someone else to do it for me.

Almost none of ESR's ideas have worked in the real world. The development model works well, but the Free Software movement was using the "bazaar" style of development succesfully for years before. It was just that no one really made huge sums of money. Cygnus did it, but they were basically a contract house. So Redhat and other distributors make money selling distros, but I don't think that any individual programs have been profitable as Free Software. I do believe that Free Software can make money, but so far it hasn't worked terribly well. I think it will take another few years for people to understand that I can sell you the program even though I never wrote it, or that they can go and sell the software to someone else too.

Opensource is an evil corporate entity that has something that really shouldn't exist in the Free software industry: A "business model".
ESR is really *not* cool.

ESR hit on Leah, a girl from the UMBC LUG (he is a horny hic even). Too bad she likes other girls...(ESR = loser or something).