Re: [ox-en] Re: RFC's, the jargon entry - Law and Rule
- From: "Benj. Mako Hill" <mako debian.org>
- Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 11:23:01 -0800
On Mon, Dec 15, 2003 at 05:08:14AM -0500, Graham Seaman wrote:
On Mon, 15 Dec 2003, Martin Hardie wrote:
This I suppose is a question. A friend and I have been doing some
stuff about the status of RFC's as law. Thus I am interested to
explore what is this thing, the "jargon entry". As it seems to
play some roles in our things are understood, explained and
regulated.
http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/
Maintained by Eric Raymond - but existed before he took it over - to
some people's annoyance, since they perceive him as altering/adding
entries to suit his personal politics...
There's an attempt by him to justify what he's done to it at:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/jargtxt.html
That page addresses issues with ESR not being involved enough to
PDP-10 culture and being too UNIX centric. It does *not* deal with the
most recent charges against him as an irresponsible maintainer of the
jargon file.
They were reported on NTK[1] with the following story:
Good to see the increasingly eccentric ERIC S RAYMOND keeping
himself occupied these days. His latest tweaks: a version bump or
two to the JARGON FILE, the ancient hacker bible of which he is
current custodian. But how steady is his hand on the sacred tome?
Worrying is esr's recent inclusion of unfamiliar terms like "Aunt
Tillie" and "GandhiCon", which on closer search-engine examination,
appear to have been used almost exclusively by Raymond himself. And
esr's current expansions of hacker dialect is curious too. New terms
include "fisking" - a term pretty much restricted to the
warblogosphere, and defined by your impartial host as "Named after a
Robert Fisk, a British journalist who was a frequent (and deserving)
early target of such treatment". Also included is
"anti-idiotarianism", as in Eric's Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto, a
fascinating call to arms that implies "Anti-Idiotarian" means "To be
against listening to anyone who would tell you you're sounding like
an idiot these days". Finally (and not included in the changelogs),
Eric has tweaked the Hacker Politics page, from its previous
description as "vaguely liberal-moderate" to
"moderate-to-neoconservative (hackers too were affected by the
collapse of socialism)". Go tell that to the Kuro5hinners,
Eric. Recalling Raymond's familiar defence of previous changes,
"rather than complaining that I am 'rewriting history', help me
write it!", let it be noted that if someone did want to fork the
Jargon File, now would be the time to do it. Raymond's previous
googlejuice at tuxedo.org has been cast to the winds. A new,
reformatted and popularly linked-to upstart could quickly seize the
top Google slot. Ha, ha, as we apparently all say, only serious.
http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/politics.html - wouldn't everyone,
from Eric's view...
http://www.science.uva.nl/~mes/jargon/p/politics.html - be slowly
changing into crypto-collectivist islamofascist sympathisers?
http://kt.zork.net/kernel-traffic/kt20030413_213.html#8 - Aunt
Tillie "figment of Erics imagination"
http://armedndangerous.blogspot.com/2002_10_13_armedndangerous_archive.html
- quoting H. Beam Piper's "Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen"
IMHO, these are much more serious accuasations and AFAIK he has not
answered these anywhere.
Regards,
Mako
[1] http://www.ntk.net/index.cgi?b=02003-06-06&l=42#l
--
Benjamin Mako Hill
mako debian.org
http://mako.yukidoke.org/