Careful what you call this. It isn't backstabbing if you get X shares for your time with the company. You simply need to understand the amount of shares approved, issued and what happens to your shares if additional shares are issued.

Equity in a small private Corporation is basically the sames as in a large public Corp. Either one can issue, or approve additional shares. If you have common equity, your claim will be diluted.

The magnitude of your dilution will likely be higher with a small, growing firm. There are ways around it, just get a lawyer. You can bind in what you're really looking for, you just need to use the law to help you. IANAL

10% of shares outstanding doesn't mean much... A perpetual (or multi-year guarantee) 10% ownership claim, irregardless of shares outstanding would be much more powerful.

Example: Year 1 - Shares outstanding 10,000 10% = 1,000 issued to you.

Year 2-5, additional 990,000 shares issued (corporations can do this whenever they want, it is called raising capital and typically results in dilution of common equity holders).

Year 6 - Shares outstanding 1,000,000, you have 1,000 or less than 1% now.

That is why you may not like the lawyers, but you might as well get one involved quickly.

From the article: Symantec is known as the maker of the Norton anti-virus software that runs... snip ...Mid-size companies typically pay Symantec $1,000 to $2,000 a month to monitor their networks. The firm has big clients, too -- including 55 of the Fortune 500 companies -- and does work for several federal agencies.

If the government comes up with a monitoring solution that is anything like what Symantec is already doing, and if serval federal agencies are already using Symantec, it wouldn't be too suprising to see security monitoring and what not farmed out to these corporations.

It would be interesting to see what comes from something like this. Who gets the contracts, and what "privs" do they get. What data are the corps allowed to get to, what are the restirictions on that data, and even worse, what they really do with it...

... because it was never as big and bloated as the Internet bubble. Furthermore, unlike all those Internet services and software packages that have just disappeared without a trace, open source software stays around: the investment in it isn't lost.

Of course, I do have my doubts that a company like Red Hat makes sense. Open source is best for specialized, highly-skilled consultants and professionals. It also makes sense for a few hardware vendors and large, established consulting shops like IBM. But companies like Red Hat and VA Linux aren't in that league.

First of all, you will not win much with push, unless you use some sort of multicast. I guess, this is hardly possible, but you can think of it. Second, you can utilize async I/O web server. With web server like Zeus you will have 10000 sockets rather than 10000 threads. I didn't check it out, but this supposedly can be done with a single box. Third, since you are dealing with applet, you can use CORBA deferred synchronous request/response, wich possibly does exactly what you want.