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Comment by cpach | Hacker News Reader

I know that ESR considers himself to be an “LBIP”. Not really convinced that the claim has merit…

He pretty clearly isn't, although he probably believes himself that he is. E.g. he claims about giflib: “This is the library that renders GIFs in your browser […] Without it the modern Internet would be unrecognizable.” Except that no browser that I know of uses giflib (e.g. Chromium uses Skia's GIF decoder, which is WUFFS-based), and GIF clearly isn't an important format for the modern Internet anyway. Besides, giflib's latest release was in 2019, so how load-bearing is his maintainership anyway?

Similarly, he somehow seems to believe Android uses his gpsd and thus is “essential for Google Maps”, and it hasn't done so for at _least_ ten years, if ever; it was in one vendor's third_party directory at some point, but I don't think it was ever in Android proper.

It pretty clearly does not, and given his role in this program, his placement of himself in it makes the whole thing pretty dubious.

This would seem consistent with his pre-Web thinking.

For example, IIRC, he tried to organize a contest on behalf of the Internet/Usenet, in which all the computer companies would compete to see who could assemble the best "dream" Unix workstation. IIRC, the unusual thing was that, for his part in facilitating this, he would receive one of the dream workstations personally.

(Which, at the time, rubbed me the wrong way, because it seemed like other Internet/Usenet projects were done more volunteer-like. But in hindsight, or at least in today's cultural conventions, someone being upfront about wanting a consideration for their effort on a project seems perfectly reasonable. It just seemed unusual to me as a kid, in the hard separation at the time, between the techie non-commercial Internet altruistic utopia we could imagine at times we were creating, and whatever different world the stereotypical MBAs would like so that they could grab wealth and power disproportionately.)

Regarding this new thing, ESR might not need the money today, though he might like to be more back in the center of things, and/or to have a positive impact. In early Web times, business wanted to pick up Linux, etc., and he became an "influencer" for open source -- maybe a figurehead, like "here's the counterculture perspective, and you can work with him; now go at it, business types" -- helping to adapt RMS's mission in a way acceptable to business. So he got a windfall when the Linux IPOs were happening: https://news.slashdot.org/story/99/12/10/0821224/esr-writes-...

Given ESR was very wealthy by most any standards, it seems very disingenuous to list himself as an LBIP. His need “high”. Seriously did he waste his fortune in which case I don’t feel bad for him or want to support his wasteful ways. Alternatively he’s still well off and just greedy.

There's a folkloric belief that ESR got very wealthy, because he wrote a blog post about how wealthy he believed he had gotten on VA Linux, but I don't think that really panned out. If you paid attention to his blog, while he was writing it, the last couple of years the narrative was instead that he was on the edge of not being able to do open source stuff anymore because he had no income; some of his friends/fans even wrote comments complaining about him asking for money, when everyone else just solves this problem by getting a job.

I don't know any more than anybody else who reads blog posts about this stuff, but I strongly suspect that he did not in fact blow a giant fortune, but rather, like a lot of people who briefly had a lot of paper wealth at that time, it never really materialized. It's an embarrassing blog post to write, "I thought it was rich, turns out I'm not", so there isn't the matching post.

Based on the lockup alone he can't have gotten that wealthy. LNUX had a 180 day lockup, after which the price had fallen to $40-50 (https://itsfoss.com/story-of-va-linux/). That'd be around $6 million based on the blog post (36 million at 274/share).

That's of course assuming he sold as quickly as he could. LNUX IPOed right before the dot com crash, a year post IPI it was 9/share (at that price, ~1 million to ESR).

2 years after "Surprised By Wealth", he wrote a commentary about VA Linux's layoffs where he more or less said outright that he'd never cashed out, which wouldn't be surprising, since he was a director of the company. One assumes he managed to get something out, but since he doesn't seem to have had a full-time job after VA Linux, it's easy to see how one could have burned through it. It feels weird doing kremlinology on this stuff; what I feel like I understand about his situation is, wherever he was then, he isn't anymore.

Whatever else he was at the time, he was certainly employable. This LBIP thing is comical because regardless of his economic circumstances, he is practically the textbook case of someone you'd want to recognize as not load-bearing. That, by itself, is not a dunk; I'm a similar textbook case: loud, but not anywhere on the Internet's critical path.

Thanks y'all for the context. I was mainly going on the context from that one slashdot link.

If he waited too long to sell and only got a ~$1 million that could quickly become $500k after taxes, especially in CA. Just another case of options/equity being worthless until there's cash in the bank.

He never cashed out. He got nothing. Just the royalties on his books and the occasional consulting contract.

I suspect there's no way ESR even got $1 million out of VA Linux.

1) ESR was on the Board of Directors of VA Linux and subject to the 180-day lockup so there is NO WAY he could sell under SEC regs until after 180 days so he couldn't get that $274/share ($36 million). I agree after 180 days his stake would be $6-7m "on paper" and 1 year out as you say ~$1million. However...

2) Per Wired article the day after the IPO covering Eric making foolish comments (actual comments: https://lwn.net/1999/1216/a/esr-rich.html Wired coverage: https://www.wired.com/1999/12/open-source-rich-opens-mouth/ ) ESR had options on 150k shares with a strike price of under 4 cents but there was a four year vesting schedule. I don't know his vesting schedule, but there's no way he had vested even half of that amount during the timeframe when the shares were still $40+. Per his resume (http://www.catb.org/~esr/resume.html) , he was a Director from November 1998 to April 2002 so not a full 4 years.

3) Confirming that further, per SEC filings required from insiders on the Board as he was, he has no registered sales while he was before he left the VA board, ie no sales in 1999-mid-2002: https://web.archive.org/web/20030201132729/http://biz.yahoo.... https://web.archive.org/web/20010615000701/http://biz.yahoo.... https://web.archive.org/web/20000815055303/http://biz.yahoo.... He is shown in that last link as having, in addition to the 150,000 shares "Initial Direct Holdings Statement" as having on Dec 31, 1999 "Acquired via Exchange" 12,952 shares with a then-market-value of 2,676,207, but he is not shown as having sold any shares. I am not sure what the taxable implications of whatever happened in that "Exchange" (if there were some, then could actually have lost money on the whole thing!) but I don't see that he sold them while he was a Director. He rode the stock the way down. Purely speculatively, I wonder if the grief he got about his comments at IPO time made it harder for him to sell while he was a Director. His sales must have been on the open market after he wasn't a Director, ie post April 2002.

4) Let's say he sold on the open market post-April 2002 sometime within the following 5 years. Per LNUX stock charts at: https://web.archive.org/web/20051208024613/http://finance.ya... https://web.archive.org/web/20020223103417/http://finance.ya... the stock bobbled between $1 and $6 from April 2001 to Jun 2007. $6 at (maybe) 162,952 shares is $977,712 max. Worst-case he had quarter vesting at IPO which he exchanged for 12,9k shares outright. And worst-case he had two more (but not the final year) years of options vested (75k) which he then sold for at a bad time for around $1 which was ~$87k. So somewhere between $100k and $1m (pre-tax!) seems likely to be what he made; the truth is somewhere in-between.

5) ESR has actually publicly answered some questions on this topic. Per http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=556#comment-228165 :

"[Q:] If I remember correctly, you've made a fortune on VA Linux's IPO. Didn't you sell those stocks while they were up?

[A:] Nope. Didn’t sell before the bust. Too busy worrying about other things, like changing the world."

6) Some ironically less-connected open source contributors were able to put their own money at risk and buy up to 100 (or 140?) shares @ $30 each pre-IPO. They were able to sell on day 1. See Chris DiBona's comments at https://slashdot.org/story/99/12/09/1324204/va-linux-systems... ("Everyone who was in the program and faxed in thier forms is by default confirmed for 100 at 30$. To change your share allotment to 50 or 140 , you must call and tell them. .... You can sell now if you like. " and bgdarnel quoting from the "VA Letter" describing how eligibility in the "friends and family" allocation to open source contributors worked. But the limits of that allocation limited the upside to < $30k. Nice if you got it (and kudos to VA for doing that!) but not making-you-rich.

7) Other clients of the IPO underwriter(s) (e.g. Deutsche Banc, etc) who got larger allocations were able to make more money... if they flipped quickly enough. There were SEC probes around oddities surrounding the IPO allocations back at the time: https://www.zdnet.com/article/sec-probes-ipo-of-va-linux-500...

Sorry for this long research project. I don't care that much but I got curious and I kept finding more tidbits as I dug.

VA Linux was quite generous in selecting their "friends and family" beneficiaries. I was one of them (and made enough money to pay cash for a used car), despite not really having contributed to Linux at all (I made some contributions to Perl related to a different OS).

I later learned that the first day pop of VA Linux was deliberately engineered — large allocations were contingent on buying more shares at market prices on opening day.

One of my great sadnesses about the long term support of FOSS was that the great redhat experiment of letting open source contributors into the IPO´s strike price, has never been repeated. For a tiny amount of re-investment into the commons like this, it would have been a better, far less scary and undermaintained world.

I really felt then, that misunderstood, and underappreciated, complicated, dedicated creators of really great code, would have a floor under them from all the companies that used it and did not understand it.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/late-ipo-change-left...

RHAT going public and sharing the IPO strike prices with the devs they based their success on, was a great day for the prospect of an indirect financial return on years of craftsmanship and care.

I hope one day, the idea finds new life.

Thanks for the research. I did similar (but less extensive) calculations a few years ago and came to the same conclusion that ESR probably got negligible money from VA Linux. Also, having your net worth drop from $36 million to ~0 can kind of mess someone up.

ESR's (slightly smug) post "Surprised by Wealth" at the time when he had $36 million on paper makes very interesting reading now: https://news.slashdot.org/story/99/12/10/0821224/esr-writes-... He implied that he was going to cash out in 6 months when his lockout expired, but that apparently didn't happen. Ironically, he said that he had much more faith in VA Linux than the U.S. economy over that 6 months. Also ironic in light of Loadsharers is his statement "Anyone who bugs me for a handout, no matter how noble the cause and how much I agree with it, will go on my permanent shit list."

That's sad; I wasn't aware of that. I didn't fully understand or agree with everything he did back then, but I didn't wish him any misfortune.

ESR explained free-software licensing in a way that made it appealing to executives and other decision-makers. In 1998, when Netscape released the source code for its browser on open-source terms, "Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale cited Raymond's 'Cathedral and the Bazaar' essay as a major influence upon the company's decision":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar#c...

(The Mozilla Foundation was created to act as the custodian of the source code released by Netscape in 1998.)

Although I can certainly understand why people do not like ESR and although he might not have made any significant contributions lately, you cannot deny that in the past he's had a positive profound effect on the industry.

Alternate take: ESR wrote a very long effortpost at a time when effortposts of any kind were, like, "get an ISBN number for it" novelties, and so found himself in a privileged position with respect to communicating about an open source movement he himself had practically nothing to do with creating. That post doesn't hold up well today (it's most famous claim has become a running joke). If CATB hadn't been written, some other effortpost would have served precisely the same utility, and open source would have continued along the same timeline. Mozilla didn't happen any faster because of ESR --- even if there are Mozilla people who disagree (I don't know that there are).

I strongly disagree that esr´s books are irrelevant. You had to be there, in 1998, I guess, facing the prospect of being fired for working on free software, as many were, or facing down the might of the legal apparatus of microsoft, and admiring his rhetorical skill at facing down the suits, as many did, then. He traveled all over the world, giving many inspirational talks.

He books were highly influential on me, and if it were not for his encouragement, and support, there would not be, oh, 10B copies of fq_codel running today, cake, or sqm, or better wifi routers, or libreqos.

We had fun, too!

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4162

I did learn from his lesson - when he told me I had to be a front man for the bufferbloat effort, in 2013, for at least 5 years - he quoted the original of this:

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” at me... and muttered under his breath,

"... and then you become a pariah."

I learned from his example.

So far, by staying on topic, and keeping my political and personal opinions out of any engagement with anyone on the web, and not writing controversial blogs (I know he has at least 3 he regrets)... I have largely escaped being a pariah, but, have also been working on fixing the same darn thing, for 7 years longer than I ever wanted to.

I found "The Art of Unix Programming" quite instructive and applied some of the advice to my work.

I would not consider ESR a Load Bearer by any means, and I dislike what his politics have turned into, but he did have a way with prose.

I have just taken the time to point out a few things he did more quietly, later in life, with enormous impact.

It's an excellent book. I hope he's remembered more for that than for CatB.

I was there in 1998. In fact, a year prior, I think I briefly had FreeBSD commit privileges†. I stand by what I wrote: if he hadn't found an audience with CATB, someone else would have found an audience with some other effortpost.

I'm not writing about his politics. I've written at length here about CATB, on its own merits, with none of the surrounding problematic context of what latter-day ESR became. It's not a good post. What's true about it isn't novel, and what's novel about it isn't true. In particular, "Linus's Law" is --- again --- a running industry joke.

† This isn't a Linux vs. FreeBSD thing, I've been a Linux person for going on 15 years now.

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