People To Thank

By Eric Raymond

I'm a full-time public-service hacker...one of the few who can afford to devote every working hour to helping the Linux community and the wider open-source world. I live simply, but even so the things I do demand a fair amount of support infrastructure -- hardware, books, a network link, a roof over my head, food, stuff like that.

Here are some of the people who help me out and/or I have financial ties to. Class acts, all of them, and people I'm glad to call friends.

VA Linux Systems

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Larry Augustin and his crew at VA Linux Systems [ http://www.varesearch.com/ ] are very helpful. They lend me office space when I'm visiting Silicon Valley. They've supplied web space for the Open Source [ http://www.opensource.org/ ] pages. And they've given me some nifty hardware [ http://tuxedo.org/~esr/hardware.html ].

VA Research makes some of the best high-quality Linux hardware on the planet (and with a cool Tux-the-Linux-Penguin logo on it, too!). I spent a week at their headquarters in April 1998, saw how they do things, got to know the people, and even helped assemble some machines myself. They're a smart and impressive operation all the way from manufacturing to after-sales support, and well plugged in to the Linux community.

So I've agreed to plug VAR discreetly on my pages, and I've been helping Larry with some ideas for making them more visible on the net. As of December 1998 I am also a member of VAR's corporate board of directors, with an explicit charter to represent the interests and values of the open-source community there. And yes, I have stock options in VA.

O'Reilly & Associates

Tim O'Reilly and his crew at O'Reilly Associates [ http://www.oreilly.com/ ] are helpful too. Mainly they give me technical books (not a trivial budget item) and slip me a few bucks for the occasional technical review of a manuscript. I've co-authored one book with ORA (``Learning GNU Emacs, 2nd edition'') and have a couple of proposals on the fire with them.

Red Hat Software

I've known and cooperated with the Red Hat guys since nobody knew who they were, back in Yggdrasil days. They put me on its `Friends & Family' list just before their August 1999 IPO, and I own some shares in them.

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Lastly, but not leastly, [Name Removed]. One of the great unsung heroes of the hacker community :-), she supplies the roof and food and stuff so I can do things like maintaining fetchmail and half a dozen FAQs and crusading for open source. Oh, yeah, and she married me, too. She's either incredibly enlightened or completely out of her mind.

Here's a thumbnail of us; click for full picture:

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Date: 1999/11/06 15:48:01