Have you read much of his writing style, or any of his disputes with others? They seem to always end up in hyperbolic, very personal polemics, like this one. Look up his encounters over the years with Bruce Perens, or RMS several times, or anyone ESR considers a "left-liberal". Also, climate scientists are malevolent frauds, in his view, Barack Obama is the worst president and anyone who can't see that is intellectually dishonest, etc., etc.
Honestly I suspect his distaste for Stallman has more to do with general politics than free-software politics in particular; ESR is an anarcho-capitalist and Stallman is leftish.
Not that that makes ESR particularly unique, but I wouldn't nominate him as a representative of even-keeled pragmatists; his temperament is much closer to the firebrand type that RMS and Theo de Raadt represent.
The difference is RMS is a fanatic with tons of accomplishments in his bag.
Blog Noise to work ratio is too high in ESR's case. I don't know what his contributions to software are. Or when was the last time I heard some major contribution from him. He always seems to find something to bad mouth.
I would consider RMS a super achiever compared to ESR.
Right, RMS at least used to write code. ESR has always been a creepy hacker fanboy, latching on to and idolizing hacker culture, but has never been part of it, and never produced any code.
Certainly "never produced any code" was hyperbole, but "contributions" is being pretty generous. Hobbling together some random scripts nobody has ever used isn't really contributing. Most of what he has tried to contribute has been rejected.
I'm curious, how does ESR make a living?
He seems to spend a lot of time running his personal site (which carries no charges or ads) and has written a bunch of Open Source software.
I don't see him doing anything that would put money into his bank account, or is he being sponsored by some company? If so who?
I am going to simply go by what ESR himself says, which is that his wife is a lawyer and so she goes and works every day which funds his ability to stay at home and write blog posts about the intellectual inferiority of black people and how the poor deserve no government help. No I am not making this up.
IIRC he was given a chunk of stock in a Linux IPO and while he lost most of its value in the dot-com crash, it still left him some spare change; add on consulting, royalties, the occasional job like being president, basic nerd frugal living, and you probably have the whole story.
I believe he was employed by the Open Source Initiative (which he co-founded) for some years, as its President. So indirectly funded by the companies that donated to OSI.
I think in general people can be levelheaded thinkers in one domain and dogmatic in another. So maybe ESR is dogmatic about other things, but this doesn't seem to be one of them from my perspective.
Are you familiar with his views about Islam or Homosexuality? Those seem pretty fanatical to me, they are completely biased and downright offensive and illiterate. He equates homosexuality with paedophilia, denies HIV is the sole cause of AIDS and believes in a conspiracy to hide the true causes, and calls for the murder of religious leaders of the middle east equating them with animals. I tried multiple times to discuss this theories with him, but he called me a "marxist anti-american fag" (sic), a label that even if undisputed gives him no logical arguments against any refutation of his bizarre theories nor justifies his calls for action or even sometimes genocide.
For some time already his mind has been drifting in a sea of obscurantist choosing of statistics and a convenient selection of right-winged american-exceptionalist conspiracy theories.
I could link to his twisted essays, but although biased the entry in Rational Wiki about him sums most of the hard facts, though I suggest you ignore their opinion and go read the compiled cited writing of ESR. http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond
I dislike seeing someone's name smeared in a vague way. A bit of googling brought up the essay you mentioned regarding homosexuality, pederasty, and pedophilia:
I have only read his technical articles that get posted to news aggregator sites -- I don't particularly care about what strange political beliefs some washed-up developer has -- and hadn't noticed anything so vile as this.
I think he still (occasionally) makes good points about development and open source, but his political and sociological views are very immature.