From: Brendan Kehoe (brendan at domain zen.org)
Date: Fri 24 Sep 1999 - 15:04:06 IST
> the irish times has a slot on redhat on the back of business 2, which is
> just below the prime slot of "famous irish business guy profile". Good
> article, all sorts of good stuff. Even mentions the stock options to
> the programmers bit.
The unsaid portion of that bit in the article was that a large number of
developers were rejected by E*TRADE because their investment goals and, more
importantly, available income as indicated on the registration form didn't
meet the minimum qualifications of what E*TRADE saw as requirements to open an
account with them. Slashdot has a long discussion (I'm hesitant to label it a
flame fest) about this in its archives. The clientele that E*TRADE strives to
reach is a vastly different group of people, for the most part, compared to
the hackers that RedHat was trying to placate somehow. One interesting
underlying thought is that a lot of the folks working on Linux or the barrage
of free software associated with it are doing so for the joy of it, not so
they can try to get some stock in what some argue is an overvalued company.
(cough)
Another part of this story was that E*TRADE completely botched the offering of
the RedHat shares, to the point where lots of folks (including myself) ended
up losing the chance of even considering saying they wanted to get some.
(After spending US$40 for UPS to deliver the printed out registration form on
time, only to learn that the date was suddenly pushed ahead a few weeks to an
intederminate time in the future.)
The only way people could know that the shares were available for them to
register an interest in buying some, was if they sat at the E*TRADE site and
kept nailing Reload until the information on the site changed. (Nearly a
word-for-word quote of one of the support idiots at E*TRADE that we spoke to.)
There was no other notification of the two-hour period of time when they were
available, nor was there any advance warning. The US stock market is
underoing a metamorphosis; now, you have to be able to hack a perl script to
do 5-minute checks on a Web site in order to find out when you should put in a
buy order. (The punchline is, of course, that it was around 11pm Ireland time
that the window opened for people to start putting in their indications of
interest.)
No, I'm not bitter at all, why do you ask? ;-)
B
-- Brendan Kehoe Web page: http://www.zen.org/~brendan/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.6 : Thu 06 Feb 2003 - 13:04:36 GMT