I would love to get a signed picture of Darl McBride for my bathroom. Because he paid for it. I heard about this lawsuit, called up a couple of IP lawyers, talked to a bunch of programmers, and read everything on groklaw. I called both analysts who covered the stock -- one had a price target of $5, while the other had a price target of $45 (stock was about 20 at the time). Then I shorted it with most of the money I had. It went down and I used the equity to short even more of it. In retrospect, the analysis was correct (i.e. don't sue a company that has more lawyers than you have employees without a good case), but the level of risk I took was insane, and it kept me up late at night for a long time.
OK, that beats my "I made $25,000 on the VA Linux IPO simply because I was an early sourceforge user and got invited to the friends and family program".
I had a buddy in college who made $25K on the VA Linux IPO for the same reason. He used it to pay for a used car and a couple year's tuition. Good times.
ours paid for part of a new car. I later ended up working with the people who set all this up- VA Linux employees- and they got nothiung because the stock crashed after that.
Eric Raymond (ESR) was a director of VA Linux. I remember seeing on Yahoo Finance in '00, but haven't been able to find again, that on Dec 30th or 31st, 1999 he exercised options for a 'gain' of around $2 million. He was locked from selling until around April. At that point all of his stock was worth around $6 million, which might have covered the AMT tax bill.
