4 ms·

Has that been true? I don't know what the company's financials have looked like year over year. > Suddenly because a founder is leaving you expect them to star

Has that been true? I don't know what the company's financials have looked like year over year. > Suddenly because a founder is leaving you expect them to start turning a profit again? No, it's more a question of whether you think the company will ever turn a profit. That's probably the point of contention over how much the shares are worth: do you think Elementary OS will ever financially support a team? If not then you probably lean closer towards a 0 dollar valuation (or in this event 26k). If you do then you probably lean closer to a 100k valuation.

fastball 5y ago
Well the tweets said sales fell and haven't recovered since COVID, which has been going on for two years now. But regardless, the value of the shares are... whatever their value is now. It doesn't matter what they might be worth in 10 years if their current value is ~zero and a founder wants to divest them now.
- dwohnitmok 5y ago
  > It doesn't matter what they might be worth in 10 years if their current value is ~zero and a founder wants to divest them now. But the current value of shares is intimately tied to what their expected future value is. Indeed in the absence of an acquisition or IPO this is the only way to determine the current value of shares. And if different people disagree on their expected future value, they will disagree on their current value.
yakak 5y ago
From the looks of it they never turned a reliable profit to pay two developers. They received a one time anonymous donation in 2018[1], that led to the second developer and looks like they were averaging about 16K a year then. In general, I think what is wrong with this argument is that they are both in the wrong. They founded a company that should have been a 501c and now they are talking about its value as an asset based on the willingness of people to make donations to enable developers to work on a project. These kinds of cream on the top FOSS projects run as companies are largely relying on naive good will of people who want to fund the best project to adapt open source to them rather than the best portion of open source for them. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_OS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_OS

fastball 5y ago

Well the tweets said sales fell and haven't recovered since COVID, which has been going on for two years now. But regardless, the value of the shares are... whatever their value is now. It doesn't matter what they might be worth in 10 years if their current value is ~zero and a founder wants to divest them now.

dwohnitmok 5y ago
> It doesn't matter what they might be worth in 10 years if their current value is ~zero and a founder wants to divest them now. But the current value of shares is intimately tied to what their expected future value is. Indeed in the absence of an acquisition or IPO this is the only way to determine the current value of shares. And if different people disagree on their expected future value, they will disagree on their current value.

yakak 5y ago

From the looks of it they never turned a reliable profit to pay two developers. They received a one time anonymous donation in 2018[1], that led to the second developer and looks like they were averaging about 16K a year then. In general, I think what is wrong with this argument is that they are both in the wrong. They founded a company that should have been a 501c and now they are talking about its value as an asset based on the willingness of people to make donations to enable developers to work on a project. These kinds of cream on the top FOSS projects run as companies are largely relying on naive good will of people who want to fund the best project to adapt open source to them rather than the best portion of open source for them. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_OS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_OS