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By Nikolaos S. Karastathis (NSK).
An outtake magazine photo showing ESR in a suit, holding a keyboard and a firearm. In USA certain guns are legal and ESR is both an open source hacker and a gun rights advocate. (source).
Eric S. Raymond at LinuxPro 1997. Credit: Andrej Brandt (source).
According to Eric S. Raymond's blog, a Microsoft recruiter sent him an email asking the well-known opensource software (OSS) advocate for an appointment in order to discuss a potential career at the company that in internal memos (now known as Halloween Documents) leaked to the public in 1998 one can read phrases such as "OSS poses a direct, short-term revenue and platform threat to Microsoft, particularly in server space. Additionally, the intrinsic parallelism and free idea exchange in OSS has benefits that are not replicable with our current licensing model and therefore present a long term developer mindshare threat.". Eric Raymond, who is one of the most vocal Microsoft critics, refused the offer.
[edit] 1 Microsoft and Raymond
Hiring away talented individuals from rival companies and groups is a well-known business strategy, which often pays results, but expecting major opensource players such as ESR to join Microsoft would be, at the best, unrealistic. One has to wonder whether Microsoft will now attempt to hire Richard M. Stallman or Linus B. Torvalds, or acquire Debian GNU/Linux. In 1999, the director of Virtual Worlds Group Microsoft Research invited ESR to speak at the Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, Washington state, offering him dinner with two science fiction writers instead of money. At that time, ESR accepted the invitation.Microsoft has since hired other open source and free software developers, including Daniel Robbins of Gentoo Linux fame. Ward Cunningham, the inventor of wiki, is also working with Microsoft.
On 8 September 2005, Eric Raymond announced in his blog that he received an unexpected email from a Senior Recruiter working for Microsoft in its Central Sourcing Team. the recruiter wrote that "Microsoft is seeking world class engineers to help create products that help people and businesses throughout the world realize their full potential" and even asked Eric Raymond to refer other people who could become contributors in Microsoft projects.
In an unrelated webpage, other recruiters who work for Microsoft Central Sourcing Team describe their job as "building communities of top technical talent" in order to fill various positions across the company.
ESR talked over the phone with the rectuiter, who claimed that a research team provided him with his name. Eric Raymond promised to reply via email.
But obviously Microsoft's recruiter wouldn't expect in the reply to read "I’ve in fact been something pretty close to your company’s worst nightmare since about 1997" and ESR showing his deep respect by describing how much he would like to p*** urinate on Microsoft's grave! You can read the full reply from ESR's blog by clicking here.
[edit] 2 Who is ESR?
ESR in a very special t-shirt. (source).
Eric Steven Raymond (ESR) is a well-known open source software advocate living in United States of America. He is the author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar and has been appeared in 3 movies, however he mostly known as the maintainer of the Jargon File, a dictionary of the hacking culture.
Although he has never taken any formal courses in computer science or software engineering, he is a self-made computer programming hacker, maintaining numerous projects, including fetchmail and Bogofilter.
He claims that back in 1980s he was one of the original GNU contributors, but nowadays he promotes the open-source concept, which is similar to, but different than, the free software philosophy promoted by Richard M. Stallman (RMS) and the Free Software Foundation and for this reason free software and opensource are now two separate movements.
One of the most important differences between the open-source and the free software movements is that many licences popular in the open source sphere, such as BSDL do not always provide the full copyleft protection of licences commonly used by the free software movement, such as GPL, and therefore opensource code can often be used in proprietary software products. In practice, however, the free/libre opensource software community is able to create better software than corporations that still base their business on the outdated closed-source model, even if opensource code is used in proprietary software, because no company in the world can outpace the throughput of thousands of developers from all over the planet who collaborate every day via the Internet. The opensource and free software movements also have some subtle, but important, social differences that are sometimes comically depicted in the webcomic "Everybody loves Eric Raymond".
Although ESR is a very popular, famous, and wealthy opensource advocate, some people consider him a controversial person because he also advocates firearms. According to his view, firearms can provide safety and liberty. After 11 September 2001 he also held some strong views favouring military intervention and the Iraq war. Raymond is also a supporter of the US Libertarian Party.
ESR is often criticised for alleged attention-seeking, and after calling himself Microsoft's worst nightmare, a visitor to his blog criticised him leading to a public reply by Eric Raymond explaining that "I've served as a public focus and embodiment of the hacker community’s values. And (this is the nightmare part) I sold them to Wall Street. I broke us out of the geek ghetto".
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