Biography
Born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1957, Raymond lived in Venezuela as a child. His family moved back to Pennsylvania in 1971. Raymond said in an interview that his cerebral palsy motivated him to go into computing. Raymond has spoken in more than fifteen countries on six continents, including a lecture at Microsoft.
He wrote CML2, a source code configuration system; while originally intended for the Linux kernel, it was rejected by kernel developers. Raymond attributed this rejection to "kernel list politics". Linus Torvalds on the other hand said in a 2007 mailing list post that as a matter of policy, the development team preferred more incremental changes.
In 2000–2002 Raymond wrote a number of HOWTOs still included in the Linux Documentation Project. His personal archive also lists a number of non-technical and very early non-Linux FAQs. His books, The Cathedral and the Bazaar and The Art of Unix Programming, discuss Unix and Linux history and culture, and user tools for programming and other tasks. In 1998 he received and published a Microsoft document expressing worry about the quality of rival open-source software. This, along with other documents subsequently leaked, became known as the Halloween Documents. Noting that the Jargon File had not been maintained since about 1983, he adopted it in 1990 and currently has a third edition in print. One purist, Paul Dourish, maintains an archived original version of the Jargon File, because, he says, Raymond's updates "essentially destroyed what held it together."
Raymond is currently the admin of the project page for gpsd, a daemon that makes GPS data from a receiver available in JSON format. Also, some versions of NetHack include his guide. He also contributes code and content to The Battle for Wesnoth.
Founded in June 2009 with Raymond's help, the hacktivist website NedaNet intended to influence the domestic opposition to the Iranian government in the event of the 2009 Iranian election protests. Named in honor of Neda Soltan, a young woman killed in unrest after the Iranian elections, it planned to offer help with proxy servers and anonymizers. Raymond was the website's public contact.
Read more about this topic: Eric S. Raymond
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