[zeruch]

You won't get downvoted, but you make a few factually questionable statements (disclosure: I worked at VA from 1998 to 2002):

1. VA didn't sponsor the event, but a chunk of the staff of the company's Sunnyvale HQ attended (and most of us were in the LUGs). VA didn't have any need at that stage to boost the IPO, as the fever was already brewing for companies like VA and Red Hat (both IPO'd that year, RH in August and VA in December).

2. VA didn't hire a camera crew either, but a friend of one of the executive staff (Jon Hall) wanted to do a story about Open Source, so Jon brought him in for a few days to do interviews and film around the office (do I think the exec staff saw the PR upside? Sure. If they hadn't they would have been foolish. But they weren't the primary driver). And IIRC, Rev OS forgot the dot com collapse because it was edited and released right before the collapse began.

3. Do I think the event was performative nonsense? Sure. I thought it was then too, much as I thought RMS was ludicrous and various other "open source luminaries" were a tad too close to 'hubris based lifeform' but the event, in the grand scheme of things, was an amusing, if ultimately pointless exercise. Not all things need to induce a sea change or have a deeper point than getting like minded folks to make a statement for its own sake.

[filmgirlcw]

I appreciate the corrections, though I’m not sure I agree with all of them.

For the first point, I appreciate your correction. Still, the official writeup mentions that VA paid to make the shirts. And as you say, a huge number of employees were part of it. I still contend that the publicity of the event was beneficial for them, otherwise they wouldn’t have had employees there and they wouldn’t have had the community in shirts they made. Red Hat didn’t IPO until August, so I’ll still say having activities like this get press attention (be it for Linux in general or VA specifically) was good for the VA Roadshow.

For number two, I’ve been told by numerous former VA people that Larry paid for the documentary to be made (at least until the collapse happened) and then the filmmaker basically ran out of money, which is why the fall of the stock was literally an on-screen card at the tail-end of the film. The film came out in 2001, though I’m sure he finished filming after the IPO,

For the third, I agree with you. You’re right, it doesn’t have to induce a sea change. And for its time, I can see how some would find it amusing (at 15, I very much rolled my eyes, but I can understand how people who were there would have had fun). My only point was to push back on what I perhaps wrongly expected the narrative on HN to be, which is reflexive hagiography that doesn’t bear much resemblance to reality then or now.

[zeruch]

Yep, VA paid for the shirts from the Community groups petty cash fund, much as we paid for events at LUGs and other non-corporate events (my first two years at VA we gave out endless amounts of swag, distro CDs, various and sundry, but the team was almost totally an island unto itself. I just have a view that the events were too community-level to have had much of anything to do with the roadshow (and certainly from a professionalism standpoint would have been a distraction), and MS was already doing FOSS (as well as other *nix vendors, primarily SUN) a bunch of favors with its antics.

I was given the "official" spiel from Hall and it was otherwise not discussed much at VA (other than deciding very shortly afterwards that we all looked largely ridiculous, a position I still agree with - thankfully I'm in it for all of 1.5 seconds), and what I recall was that it was finished shortly after IPO and then sat for a while (because of lack of funds) waiting for final edits. At that stage you can't exactly go back to re-film much if you're already scrambling for cash.

"My only point was to push back on what I perhaps wrongly expected the narrative on HN to be, which is reflexive hagiography that doesn’t bear much resemblance to reality then or now." My feelings on pretty much all coverage of SV in general. But I am very biased, in that I love what I do in tech at the micro level but am ambivalent as to what the industry itself has morphed into. The beginning VA days were full of pre-HN/TechCrunch/Reddit sincere sense of wonder and opportunity to do something for the time radically different; in many ways VA succeeded given where the alumni landed (various key spots at Google, 23andMe, AWS, Samsung, Apple, AMD etc) and I still consider that period to be some of the most exciting of my career, if only for the sheer seat-of-pants ride it was.

I learned a lot and made numerous lifelong friends (and maybe a few lifelong enemies), but it was a helluva ride (cheesy events held in Fry's parking lots notwithstanding).

[choppaface]

“But I am very biased, in that I love what I do in tech at the micro level but am ambivalent as to what the industry itself has morphed into [...] I still consider that period to be some of the most exciting of my career, if only for the sheer seat-of-pants ride it was.”

Oof! It’s still important to be aware of the cost of that ambivalence. Maintaining an OS for desktop users? Probably pretty safe. Maintaining servers for Experian? Or Uber’s car right before they killed Elaine Herzberg? Yeah ambivalence (and that ride) is a privilege.

[rbanffy]

> VA didn't hire a camera crew either, but a friend of one of the executive staff (Jon Hall) wanted to do a story about Open Source

Jon "Maddog" Hall is an awesome guy, BTW. He used to be a constant presence at the Brazilian Free Software Forum (FISL). He's now the board chair of the LPI.

[zeruch]

Oops, wrong one. John Hall (often used the faux middle name "Tiberius" for reasons no one understood) was a young exec from Stanford who now is an exec...somewhere else? (It's been a while since I even had to recall the guy), not Maddog. Maddog was and is a Prince of a fellow.

[schoen]

Huh! This reminded me that I once knew that there were two different people called Jon/John Hall, and then forgot.

I've met Maddog a number of times, most often in Brazil. It's amazing how much of a celebrity he is for Brazilians; there would sometimes literally be a long line of people waiting to be photographed with him.

[zeruch]

He was/is one of the very few "open source luminaries" I actually think highly of as a person. Ted Tso, Jeremy Allison are a few others. Highly intelligent, highly thoughtful people. Working with them was a treasured experience.

[rbanffy]

> It's amazing how much of a celebrity he is for Brazilians

Are you kidding? He looks like Santa!