The discussion to which I'm referring is on his blog. Please be less hostile.
Link to that particular blog posting?
Readit Newsdfrage commented on Load-Bearing Internet People esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8383... · Posted by u/ingve
Dead Comment
I don't understand your objection. Either you do the work or you don't. There's no "critical Internet infrastructure" value in simply attaching your name to things.
Here you're blatantly accusing ESR of fraud, which per you "requires an active intent to acquire something of value through misrepresentation", to wit, soliciting money for "attaching his name to things".
We have no basis for a discussion of the work you claim he's not doing.
As I understand it, NTPsec, a hostile fork of ntpd, is not a well-regarded project. Look at the "project accomplishments" page and see what they don't claim to have accomplished: the elimination, prior to publication, of any vulnerabilities in a msinstream/default ntpd configuration. They reorganized a bunch of code, swapped strcpy's (and strncpy's) with strlcpy, moved the project out of Bitkeeper (something that has nothing to do with security but is the first listed achievement on the site), and generally removed stuff nobody enables in ntpd.
Before it lost funding, Raymond was openly discussing rewriting the whole thing in Go, which sort of gives the lie to the idea that the project was operating in good faith.
Accusing ESR and the rest of the NTPsec project of fraud is a very serious claim. Could you explain in more detail why contemplating rewriting of most or all of the project in Go as he was learning the language is such a definitive tell?
Raymond didn't write gpsd, did he? He took it over as the "maintainer". But as 'geofft observed awhile ago, if you actually git-log the project, you'll see that most of the substantive changes to gpsd aren't Raymond's.
Is it possible that what Raymond really has is a (waning) talent for getting his name attached to other people's work?
This is merely a list of the "critical Internet services or libraries" that he claims in one way or another, and ensuring the maintenance of such software is part of the whole thesis.
To scare quote that, and denigrate it over "substantive changes" ... well, I must thank for your solid support of his thesis.
It's sort of out of scope so let's not dwell on his slow descent into predictably cantankerous obscurity. You can descend into his blogs, sword and torch in hand, ready to do ideological combat with the horrors from beyond the stars that lurk there on your own time.
The key idea: that he is an ILBP (or has been in 10 years) is absurd. He is not, and he claims he's not hurting for money.
> The key idea: that he is an ILBP (or has been in 10 years) is absurd. He is not....
This attitude denies support to projects like NTPsec, for which he's the technical lead, your take on this concept only applies to current maintainers of existing projects.
Even then, he's converting GCC to git, the latter indirectly bears a great deal of "Internet Load".
GPSD was historically an important project, but I wouldn't call it "load bearing" in the same sense as core networking or service contributions.
It's also increasingly less important as the changes dropped in 4.19 are picked up by downstream software authors. Most software installations that care about gps are deployed in SBC configurations. A lot of other folks (e.g., hobbyists with external microcontrollers or arm SBCs) are parsing directly.
Folks most interested in linux attached hardware are either older school hardware hackers (who rely on this project) or folks using new LoRa radios (in which case that stuff is in the card and annoyingly locked down because it's part of some LoRa monetization schemes).
Sooooo yes. Not a bullshit project. But no, not a ILBS project.
I'll repeat the claim from the NTPsec project page:
> GPSD has billions of deployments in Android smartphones world wide and is a mission-critical component in most of the world’s drones and driverless cars and robot submarines.
And tools, to support for example the development of tools like Emacs and GCC, indirectly support "core networking or services".
You can narrowly define "core networking or service contributions" to exclude everyone by Linus Torvalds and Vint Cerf, but that's boring.
But none of these are within the implicit scope of "Internet Load Bearing Software" though, are they? We're aware of his prior involvement with ILBS, but he hasn't been sharp in that game for a long time now.
NTPsec aspires to be "Internet Load Bearing Software".
Well, it is ESR speaking...
Who just happens to be the tech lead to a partial answer to this problem: http://ntpsec.org/ Which implicitly criticizes the reference implementation.