"Same job. Different cubicle"

With the promise of stock riches now a distant dream, VA Linux's former programmers keep the open-source faith.

By Sam Williams

July 31, 2002 | In 1999, when 22-year-old Linux developer Michael Jennings accepted a job with the promising, albeit slightly obscure, West Coast start-up company VA Linux Systems Inc., he had no idea he would be participating in one of the biggest roller-coaster rides in Silicon Valley history.

"To be perfectly blunt about it, I had no idea what an IPO was or what stock options meant," admits Jennings.

Three years and $1.4 billion in evaporated investors' money later, Jennings can no longer feign ignorance. Like a farmer who has seen a tornado from the inside, Jennings recalls the company's historic first day of public trading with a mixture of bemusement and awe.

"None of us expected it to be nearly as big as it was," he says, drifting back to Dec. 9, 1999, the day NASDAQ investors turned Jennings and many of his co-workers into momentary paper millionaires. "I don't think even the president of the company knew it was going to be such a massive deal."

That was then, of course. VA's soaring stock price -- propelled by almost every major investment fad of the late 1990s: dot-coms, b2b, open-source software -- would soon come hurtling earthward. By the end of 2000, the company was outpacing the NASDAQ collapse. Caught between plummeting market share and an investment community clamoring for profits, VA Linux dumped its core hardware business in the spring of 2001. In October 2001, after posting a quarterly loss of $290 million, VA Linux laid off the bulk of its technical staff, including Jennings.

One could forgive Jennings a moment's bitterness. Since leaving VA, Jennings has returned to his native Louisville, Ky., where he now works as director of engineering at N+1, a Linux services and training firm with no immediate IPO prospects. Asked to dish dirt on the company that pulled him west, however, Jennings, like many of his former co-workers, can only shake his head and wax nostalgic.

"VA was, without a doubt, the most incredible team of people I'd ever worked with," he says. "Laid-back. Fun. Interesting projects. The managers and V.P.s were all very approachable. For the most part, they treated the engineers just like peers.

"We were all a big group of friends."

Three years after leading the Linux charge, the words "VA Linux" elicit a complex mixture of emotions. To investors, they represent the ultimate betrayal: a can't-miss stock that missed big. To the company that changed its name to VA Software Inc. last December, they signify the distant past. To ex-employees like Jennings, however, they symbolize something larger. They symbolize a time when many of the world's best open-source programmers worked under the same roof, a time of promise and, ultimately, of failed opportunity. The epitome of investors' irrational exuberance to some, VA Linux has become the corporate equivalent of paradise lost to the open-source developers who used to work there.

Next page: It cost him $25,000 a year to work there, thanks to taxes on stock options