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Full agreement. Minor quibble: > Just look at Open Source and Linux. It's obvious that Linus is no where near compensated for the imprint that his work has had
by smitherfield 10y ago
Full agreement. Minor quibble:
> Just look at Open Source and Linux. It's obvious that Linus is no where near compensated for the imprint that his work has had on technology, yet he did it and continues to do it anyway.
I've read that Linus has a personal fortune of at least $40 million. (He presumably commands an hourly consulting rate in the high five or even six figures).
So yeah, he's no Gates/Jobs, but he's doing pretty well for himself. And Linux would never have been viable as a commercial product. (It would just be some Finnish dude's buggy/incomplete Solaris clone).
IMO a better example in tech of a founder making a financial sacrifice for the common good is Jimmy Wales. If Wikipedia had been a for-profit/ad-supported site, he'd be a billionaire now.
- return0 10y agoAnd both are outliers. There are very few hugely successful projects, but billions of blog posts.
- raiyu 10y ago$40MM is definitely nothing to scoff at but if you consider the overall enterprise value of linux out there in the wild, then it's definitely less than even 1% of the value that was created. So on absolute basis compared to a regular salary it's great, but relatively to the value created, it's no where near the value that he brought to the world.
- smitherfield 10y agoBut no value would've been created if Linux hadn't been open-source.