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04/20/2005: "ESR as financial adviser"

Rogers Cadenhead has a new piece out on ESR's financial woes

When Sun CEO Scott McNealy called Linux a "zero-revenue model" that could help the company's hardware business, Raymond responded in an open letter:

... the casual equation between "open source" and "zero revenue" suggests that on another level you don't really know what you're talking about. Open source is hardly a zero-revenue model; ask Red Hat, which had a share price over triple Sun's when I just checked.

I practically did a spit take when I read Raymond's taunt this morning. Anyone who compares two companies' share prices as a means of assessing their worth has even less business sense than I do.

It goes on to detail how ESR, dispite his earlier bragging, managed to turn over $36 million dollars in VA Linux shares to $195,000 of cash (pre-tax) in the span of two and one-half years.

Thanks to stubbornness, company loyalty, or a total lack of investment acumen, his own fortunes followed the same miserable trajectory as anyone who bought into one of the Linux IPOs on Day One.


Remember that this is the same ESR who conspired to steal the world's attention away from Free Software, creating his own term "Open Source" to use as a new brand in strict opposition to the one model of software development that has a chance to lift all boats.

Instead, we got license proliferation.