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Comment by stephenjudkins | Hacker News Reader

Even if he's 100% correct I find Eric Raymond very difficult to read. His writing is evocative of that guy who gets really close to your face as he gets really excited about something you don't care about.

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There are five comments on this thread right now, and all of them are personal attacks on the author. What the hell, people?

My thought exactly. Whatever you think of ESR's writing, it's less predictable and repetitive than most of the comments people post on forums whenever he writes something new.

If you disagree with a post, do the work of explaining why.

The problem with ESR's writing is similar to the no a_hole rule for hiring. a_holes often have very valid points but the way in which they present their case leads to more drama than it's worth.

I disagree with ESRs position because the meat of what he says are ad hominem attacks repeated ad nauseam. It's a troll in essay form and should be regarded as such.

Q: Is there any way to print an asterisk? I tried double asterisk and \asterisk to no avail. It just obliqued my text

If you put a space after the * it will be preserved.

I'm not personally attacking the author, I'm attacking his writing. There's nothing wrong with that. In fact, I'd argue any implied personal attacks in my comment are far milder than those in Raymond's post.

If you read around the personal attacks, ESR has an interesting point: The rules of open source allow anyone to fork Google's work, which allows people trust the platform more, which spreads the platform in ways that would otherwise be impossible. And he relates this back to game theory:

The bottom line is that these selfish agents can form a stable cooperative equilibrium that wouldn’t be stable without the open-source commitment.

Same. Every time he referred to the author as "Mr. Brave Contrarian Guy" I felt like closing the tab.

It's rather ironic for ESR to call someone 'contrarian.'

ESR might have been relevant and interesting at one point - way back in the past. Now , he is just a blowhard with an inflated ego.

I am not sure at what point he "jumped the shark" but somewhere down the line his articles/notes started being about showing-off rather than being about substance.

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