Microsoft attempts to recruit Eric Raymond

A Microsoft recruiter’s e-mail to Eric S. Raymond, a well-known open source developer and evangelist, cracked me up this morning. Senior recruiter Mike Walters sent Eric an e-mail allegedly on the recommendation of a research team at Microsoft.

If you had bothered to do five seconds of background checking, you might have discovered that I am the guy who responded to Craig Mundie’s “Who are you?” with “I’m your worst nightmare”, and that I’ve in fact been something pretty close to your company’s worst nightmare since about 1997.