Its not that I’m a newbie, but sometimes I just feel that way. People start and talk in acronyms on IRC, and then it comes out that these acronyms stand for apparently famous people in the Free Software world I should know…
Lets start with an easy one: rms.
Yeah, that was easy. If you come across this nick in an IRC channel, make sure you don’t talk about the advantages of proprietary software, Richard Matthew Stallman may just jump at you and bash you with a big club.
Now, who might be esr?
Actually I learned about his nick not too long ago. He stumbled into the #monotone channel on OFTC last December and asked about the backgrounds of the monotone project. He prepared a paper of modern revision control systems at that time (I only have a dead link where it used to reside), but I guess most people will rather know him from one particular essay anyways, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”: Eric S. Raymond.
Now, if esr is Eric S. Raymond, who might be rse?
If you’re working with web servers, and here in particular with the one from the Apache Foundation, you probably know of this one swiss army knife ™ which solves all your redirecting / load balancing / other weird use case problems – mod_rewrite! But actually, the person I’m talking about, is also highly popular for being the main author / founder of other popular Open Source software project, like OpenSSL, OpenPKG or RPM5: Ralf S. Engelschall. If you catch him somewhere and you’re using his software on a daily basis (like I do), do not forget to praise him ;).
Now the last, pretty hard one for me at least, I just learned today: Who’s famous for his nick drh?
I felt pretty stupid when I learned about his nick; after all I’m using his software on a daily basis as well – indirectly at least. He’s the author of SQLite (monotone’s database backend), the creator of CVSTrac (the inspiration for the nowadays widely used Trac project) and he has of course, like the other people I introduced here, his own wikipedia entry. I’m speaking of D. Richard Hipp.
So this was my Little Nickname Science. If you’ve similar anecdotes I’d love to hear them!