>
> it was eric raymond, or esr, who developed sendmail.
>
raymond has done some work with linux and i think wrote big parts of xemacs, but this is definitely news to me and i owe eric allman an apology for cursing him for the convoluted state machine syntax of the old sendmail conf files ;-), but hey, it provided a good way of identifying true geeks! no, the truth is definitely that allman wrote sendmail afaik:
http://www.sendmail.org/~eric/
> secondly, i think m.p. was making an analogy, an imperfect one, of course.
>
> while there is a manifest function, as the functionalists would say,
> there is also a latent function: academia provides research and
> development that will later be exploited by capital. i think the
> analogy is probably only flawed because you're using examples mainly
> from the earliest points in the development of the professions. as the
> profession becomes more rationalized, i'd suspect that michael is
> probably more likely accurate. while there are always people who do it
> for the joy of doing it, it's success on a capitalist scale depends on
> deploying that energy in a way that ensures that the dead body of labor
> line the pockets of capital.
i will definitely bow to m.p's and your opinion when it comes to analyzing the economic/political implications and consequences of open source development. i was addressing (no doubt imperfectly!) what i read in m.p's post as references to the motivation of open source developers and their backgrounds. i agree with your classification of my examples as early points in open source, but i am not sure that current efforts are much different - i could be (and often am) wrong about that!
--ravi
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- man is said to be a rational animal. i do not know why he has not been defined as an affective or feeling animal. more often i have seen a cat reason than laugh or weep. perhaps it weeps or laughs inwardly - but then perhaps, also inwardly, the crab resolves equations of the 2nd degree. -- alasdair macintyre.