If Linux has a public relations department, it’s Eric Raymond. Long-time hacker (he wrote fetchmail) and self-confessed cultural ethnographer, Raymond has had much to do with the intense media buzz that has sprung up around Linux and open source software in the last few years. As president of the Open Source Initiative, his essays and public pronouncements have done much to express the open source value proposition, and his infamous leaking of internal Microsoft documents about open source (the Halloween documents) made it clear that not just the hackers were listening to what he had to say. Raymond recently showed Linux Magazine Publisher Adam Goodman and Executive Editor Robert McMillan around the offices of VA Linux Systems, where he has a seat on the board of directors.
LINUX MAGAZINE: Maybe we should start at the beginning. Where did Eric Raymond spring from?
ERIC S. RAYMOND: I’m actually a second-generation hacker. My father programmed from the earliest days of the great mechanical dinosaurs in the 1950s into the 1960s — Univac machines. He learned computers in the Air Force. He was involved with high-altitude meteorology and he was always very proud of the fact that he was the first enlisted man to take the Air Force’s…
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