Among those lucky shareholders was Eric Raymond, who,
as a company board member since the Mozilla launch, had
received 150,000 shares of VA Linux stock. Stunned by
the realization that his essay contrasting the
Stallman-Torvalds managerial styles had netted him $36
million in potential wealth, Raymond penned a follow-up
essay. In it, Raymond mused on the relationship between
the hacker ethic and monetary wealth: Reporters often
ask me these days if I think the open-source community
will be corrupted by the influx of big money. I tell
them what I believe, which is this: commercial demand
for programmers has been so intense for so long that
anyone who can be seriously distracted by money is
already gone. Our community has been self-selected for
caring about other things-accomplishment, pride,
artistic passion, and each other.See Eric Raymond, "Surprised by Wealth," Linux
Today
(December 10, 1999).
http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=1999-12-10-001-05-NW-LF
Whether or not such comments allayed suspicions that
Raymond and other open source proponents had simply
been in it for the money, they drove home the open
source community's ultimate message: all you needed to
sell the free software concept is a friendly face and a
sensible message.
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