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1:45 p.m.: I sold my newly purchased shares of Red Hat at $46.94 in order to have funds to cover my affinity program offer. I almost covered my brokerage fee with the three-eights gain. The stock price continued to rise.

Throughout the afternoon rumors raged. The affinity members were getting their shares. No, they weren't. Whenever I managed to get two customer service reps in a row who'd tell me the same thing, someone would e-mail me saying they'd been told the opposite. Finally I was told that the affinity shares allocation was "under way." An hour later, it was still "under way." Red Hat closed on the market at $52.06. If I'd known that E-Trade was going to dally so much, I could have held onto the stock I purchased and sold it at closing for a 13 percent gain. I didn't have enough money to care, but I was sure someone would be pissed. All I could do was keep hitting the reload button on the Web page with my E-Trade account information, hoping against hope that something would finally happen.

And, at last, it did. At 9:30 p.m., after slapping reload one more weary time, I found an alert waiting. I had been allocated 400 shares. Hallelujah, praise be.

At 10:43 p.m. E-Trade sent out another "request for reconfirmation of conditional offer." Does this mean they'll take away my shares if I don't jump through more hoops? The e-mail offers three different means to confirm; I do all of them, phone, e-mail and Web. Also, it mentions a 3 p.m. Friday deadline for reconfirmation. I can't figure out whether this is generosity or incompetence.

As midnight passed, many friends of mine still hadn't received notification of any kind. But my adventures were completed, at least. I got 400 shares. A nice piece of cash. But at what cost?

Red Hat's original offer was intended to be a community-solidifying gesture. If you're cynical, it was intended to strengthen community support in order to improve Red Hat's bottom line. It did neither. The initial windfall quickly became a huge hassle. The developers who didn't make each successive hurdle erected by E-Trade became more and more embittered. And, as many members of the community focused on the strategies that would enable them to participate in the offer, the complaints of people who hadn't been invited to participate grew ever more shrill. Instead of a big love-fest, with hackers celebrating a few more days of not having to worry about who would be buying the Chinese food, the scene turned ugly, with the hackers locked in constant negotiation with E-Trade drones who seemed intent on making the gift as hard as possible to attain. And those, like me, who had to pull on our relatives' net worth to be included at all had a bitter taste in our mouths.

Red Hat's offer to the open-source world was intended to be empowering: Ordinary developers would be able to take a financial stake in a company we helped create. Instead, our alienation from the system became more obvious with every passing day. We had no power in this world; no one cared to listen to what we had to say. No developer got more than 500 shares from the affinity program; none of us were going to retire early or change our lifestyle.

But money is not why we write code all day, and hang out on in chat rooms with other developers on the weekends. I can't explain what makes us write code any more than a poet can tell why he or she writes. But perhaps Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman is right about the promise of reward being no real motivator. Certainly this IPO did little to further the goals of free software. Perhaps the next free software company to go public will learn from Red Hat's mistakes.
salon.com | August 13, 1999

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