Bruce following ESR [LWN.net]

Bruce following ESR

Posted Oct 2, 2006 18:22 UTC (Mon) by landley (guest, #6789)
In reply to: Bruce following ESR by bronson
Parent article: Busy busy busybox

The difference is Eric's still coding.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/software.html

That page is actually out of date (for example he handed off fetchmail to
new maintainers years ago), but I know he's still actively working on
GPSD. In the past five years he's launched a half-dozen new projects, and
either handed them off to new maintainers (for example bogofilter) or
completed them (for example comparator, which was used in the SCO trial).
Plus he's written another New York Times bestseller (The Art of Unix
Programming). This isn't exactly resting on his laurels. (You don't hear
so much about him anymore because he doesn't travel as much anymore; he
got sick of it and went back to his computer to get some work done.)

Eric may be darn annoying at times, and lots of things he says may need to
be taken with a grain of salt, but he does still actually contribute new
and interesting things. And I'm unaware of him going back to any project
he worked on ten years ago (such as the infrastructure of what is now
ibiblio, or the emacs lisp library) and chewing them out for doing it
wrong without being willing to actually contribute anything new.

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Bruce following ESR

Posted Oct 2, 2006 22:59 UTC (Mon) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

I use GPSD and enjoy the design of it.

Bruce Perens already followed ESR a while ago with his Desktop linux stuff being based on the 'next' Debian stable release... and being screwed over as the stable Debian release never materialized in a sane time frame.

The trouble with ESR is that his 'leaps of logic' aren't very logical. Bruce Perens is much more coherent.

Bruce following ESR

Posted Oct 7, 2006 15:01 UTC (Sat) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

Bruce claimed that Userlinux was ready to ship the moment Debian did. It turned out that this wasn't actually true - even if Debian had released six months or a year earlier, there's no evidence to suggest that Userlinux would actually have appeared anyway. Ubuntu ended up being many of the things that Userlinux was intended to be, and had successfully generated a technical community even before releasing the first version of their software. If you go back and look at the Userlinux mailing list archives, it's pretty clear that that wasn't happening for them.