Eric Raymond, controversial spokesman for the Linux community, published an impassioned plea to his brethren to find a replacement for him.
Raymond cited, among other reasons, the fact that the Linux community was dividing on itself, and attacking him despite the blood, sweat, and tears he's poured into the movement.
"What will hurt you the most is the people you love, the tribe you've sweated blood to serve," Raymond wrote. "Because they'll turn on you. They will. Not all of them, not even most of them, but enough of them to be wounding."
Raymond described his job as "public advocate for the hacker tribe, speaker-to-journalists, evangelist/interface to the corporate world."
He is credited with convincing many large software corporations, notably Netscape, and more recently, Apple, to adopt an open source model for portions of their proprietary software.
As a result of some of these licensing agreements with large companies, Raymond has waged a public battle against Bruce Perens, co-founder of the Open Source Initiative.
This month, Perens and Raymond traded barbs in newsgroups and news articles over the open-source license Raymond helped Apple design.
"Even though you know with the top of your brain that a lot of the hecklers are testosterone-poisoned adolescents acting out at your expense. Even if you know that not one in fifty of the back-seat drivers has anything like your coding [credentials], not one in a hundred has the right personality type to fill your shoes, and not any damn one of them has walked a mile in those shoes.... It will hurt," Raymond wrote.
