[cypherpunks]

I'm not sure if I trust much be ESR. He's extremely eloquent, so what he writes always sounds convincing. In practice, he's a pretty bad developer, or at least he was at the time he wrote most of his stuff (at the time, the most serious technical accomplishment he had under his belt was a refactoring of fetchmail). When I've applied the things he's written, more often than not, they've lead me astray. He has, more often than not, messed up in contexts involving technical interaction with other people (e.g. CML2). This is in stark contrast to e.g. RMS, who usually puts people off, but whose writing tends to be dead-on correct (if you don't believe me, read almost anything he wrote 10-30 years ago, and see how it panned out -- the guy's almost a prophet, cursed to know the truth but not be able to convince people). So I take everything ESR writes with a very large, maybe unhealthy degree of skepticism. It's too easy to be convinced of something incorrect (many eyes make bugs shallow, negative attitude towards RMS, etc.).

I'm looking at his page now, and he appears to have written or contributed to more software since, so I'm not sure if this still applies. I suspect it does, but I'm not ready to pass judgment until I read his more recent essays.

[kahawe]

I never understood where his "claim to fame" really came from? Apart from publishing and then maintaining a pre-existing dictionary on his website, publishing one of MANY books on Open Source and cursing admins with fetchmail, he hardly contributed to or founded any REALLY big projects or coded a lot like Linus or RMS did or did anything of real substance - but esr was always one of THOSE names during his heyday and he would go to great lengths telling everyone how "the community" selected him to be some sort of open source Keanu Reeves/Neo...

[sesqu]

Writing has historically been very important for recognition, especially current writing.

[cypherpunks]

He's an exceptionally good communicator and has very strong soft skills, and applies them to self-promotion. He's also good at politics (as in convincing crowds of people -- not so much at interacting and making long-term connections with individuals). A lot of this has to do with feeling out crowds, and telling them what they want to hear. He's also got a slightly underdeveloped moral compass, which always helps (he was willing to be a little bit sleazy and subtly undermine competitors). That's mostly what it takes to get famous. He was also the only person, after RMS, who was arrogant enough to take credit for the whole movement.