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The Ars Digita story is a classic example of what Cringely is talking about- a company run into the ground by "professional" managers brought in by the VCs. Here's the story, as told by one of the company's founders:

http://eveander.com/arsdigita-history

Even though it's "just one side of the story," the consensus is that it's pretty close to what really happened.

In the end, the VCs cut a deal with Redhat, who hired a few of Ars' staff to make it look like the company was successfully sold. Fortunately, Ars' great products live on as open source software, OpenACS, and Redhat's CCM. Though Ars' incompetent management pushed CCM as the next, great version of their software, it was never more than vaporware. Redhat has continued to develop it, but it's still not finished.

Reminds me of an Philip Greenspun article on the exact same topic. I think Linux Journal ran some ideas on that as well. Not exactly original.

Why? Well, what use is a four year old copy of Python when I can download a current version just as easily? I'd have been happier if that one was a couple bucks cheaper, just as I was happy about the blurbs on the back of Philip & Alex's Guide to Web Publishing and Mac OS9 Missing Manual saying that avoiding the cd keeps costs down while allowing you to get more up to date software. As a paying customer, I appreciate that sort of consideration for my needs and my wallet. So to me, it's kind of a tradeoff among several factors. In no particular order:

• Having the media for a large set of software like FreeBSD is good, because it can avoid a huge download and I can live with a complete but outdated version of things, for a while anyway.
• Having the media for the CD bookshelf is good because it gives you the text -- in this case, of several books -- in searchable digital format.
• Providing the media for smaller, rapidly evolving material like a programming language or major application is less appealing when downloading is a viable alternative.
• Providing a central website is a great way to keep updated while saving some of the publishing costs, but the risk there is that you could lose ready access to the material if the site disappears or moves (like for example the FreeBSD book, though of course that's available elsewhere too; that isn't always the case of course).
• Obviously, the shelf life of a lot of CD-ROMs is limited, and people aren't going to be happy about paying for something out of date. Even if the material happens to be current, if it can be downloaded for free then there's little benefit in having the disc.
• On the other hand, sites obviously aren't eternal but discs come close enough for most purposes (even if their contents don't hold up as well), and download size is a factor to consider.
• Copyright is another angle that your publisher will probably want to have some control over, and no one likes having to go through arcane, tedious hoops to download some tools [I'm looking at you, Apple -- your Developer's site is a royal pain in the ass...], and no one wants to be the victim of an abandoned product
• If you're going to include a CD then you might as well fill up all 600mb or so of available space: if there's room for it and you're not afraid of copyright infrigement, include the text of the book, otherwise throw in a Linux distribution, tools like Perl & Apache [for Unix, Windows, and Mac], pad it out with DeCSS code, etc. In short, make it worth the customer's extra cash. (Slight counterargument: you probably don't want to take on support liability for anything you include, so don't forget whatever legalese would be appropriate there.)

Deciding what way to go is a matter of looking at factors like these & others, and evaluating what you're trying to provide for your customer and what their expectations are likely to be over time. If the digital material is just a supplement to the book, and can be easily downloaded, then most customers will probably appreciate it if you save them a few bucks & don't include the CD. On the other hand, if the book is really a supplement to the discs, and the digital material is difficult or impossible to download (for bandwidth, copyright, or other reasons) then including the CD media is a good idea. Find out where things seem to balance and make your decision from there.

Phillip Greenspun's book SQL for Web Nerds is a very nice introduction to SQL. It would be a good idea to grab a copy of PostgreSQL or one of those Oracle demo cds that are as common as AOL cds, and work through the exercises in it.

Please avoid MySQL if you are just learning SQL. You'll just have to unlearn all of the workarounds for the features (such as real transactions, and referential integrity to name two) which it is missing when you move to a real database.

What's the deal with all the pseudo-latin branding in the tech industry lately? We've got ArsTechnica, ArsDigita, and apparently now DesignTechnica.

Honestly, what's next? DigitalArs(e)?

Go to http://www.greenspun.com, http://photo.net, and http://www.arsdigita.com. Philip will teach you the way...

In case you don't wander across it, read Philip's book about web design.

Also, some other related reading would be Nielsen Norman Group, Nielson's own site www.useit.com, and their friend tog.

Make it work first, make it pretty last. User interface is key.

Go to http://www.greenspun.com, http://photo.net, and http://www.arsdigita.com. Philip will teach you the way...

In case you don't wander across it, read Philip's book about web design.

Also, some other related reading would be Nielsen Norman Group, Nielson's own site www.useit.com, and their friend tog.

Make it work first, make it pretty last. User interface is key.

I think it comes down to the specific situation.
If you are writing the latest star trek game, then spock ears are fine.
If you are writing banking software, then they probably aren't.
If you want to be taken seriously as a profession, then I believe you have to act like the other professions.
This is what I mean by professionalism:
Redefining Professionalism for Software Engineers

No, he joined in April 2000. Can you read?

And stop getting your friends to moderate you up.

There is an old arsdigita article about exactly this subject that is kind of long, but very good. I especially like the part were he syas how much more effective a good coder is to a mediocre coder-

http://www.arsdigita.com/asj/managing-software-eng ineers/

The aD and OpenACS (Ben Adida) presentations were informative. Unfortunately it appears that ACS5 and OpenACS4+ are on divergent paths (I add the + as OpenACS4 isn't simply a PostgreSQL port as OpenACS3 was, OpenACS developers are doing considerable design on things like database independence). I believe Ben said that aD and OpenACS people are talking, though we could end up with two products, and that wouldn't be a bad thing.

I think two divergent products would be a bad thing. The developer community is small. I'd like to be able to take a package from aD, OpenACS, or a third party and port it to my particular ACS installation with minimal effort. Given that Tcl and Java versions will exist for the forseeable future, I suppose this means at least keeping the data models in sync. Preferably the SQL queries would also be common across Java and Tcl for a given database.

I hope that OpenACS developers don't do too much design and innovation within OpenACS, as it will only duplicate efforts from aD in the same problem space. The ball is really in aD's court here. It can open up all phases of the ACS5 developement process (that means now) and leverage the developer community, which I think will make ACS5 as well known and widespread as Apache (in a much smaller niche obviously), or it can see interacting with outside developers as a cost, increasing its long term engineering costs and descreasing the value it can provide to clients.

"Core" products are what the open source community does best. Consider the Linux kernel versus free word processors. The kernel is wildly successful, while open source word processors haven't been adopted despite several good efforts.

aD should learn from this and leverage the community to develop core ACS functionality. aD provides value to its customers through applications built on top of ACS (whether it be for hire or through licensing of future proprietary packages), not through developing ACS.

The website wasn't always buzzword bingo. It used to be reasonably informative, although with some amount of Greenspun-style bombast (which you might think is worse). You can probably find some of the older content still on there, 'ACS Developer Journal' articles, tutorials and so on. The site developer.arsdigita.com is where most of the info moved to.

As Joel Spolsky suggests, you could take the decline in the website's usefulness as indicating the general health of the company.

ArsDigita switched to the ArsDigita Public Liscense a few months ago when they released ACS 4.6. As you can imagine, this pissed off many people in the community. However the folks at OpenACS have ported ACS 3 and ACS 4.2 (both under the GPL) to Postgresql. Work continues, unabated by short-sighted VC's.

...is how much of arsdigita was skill, and how much was dotcom bubble.

Greenspun is right, he and some friends built the company up to be quite formidable. It could be argued that they did this at just the correct time. He personally had a lot of technical insight (as evidenced by his book Philip and Alex's guide to Web Publishing) but was perhaps lacking in business acumen.My own suspicion is if they were still in charge and had *not* gone for funding, the company would still be around. It has been unfortunate watching the company stagnate, and the layman would certainly see the progression of success, funding, stagnation, winding up.

The VC's certainly didn't seem to understand the culture when they took on the company, which led to quite a few people leaving, and disquiet from the people who had previously supported the culture and ethos of the firm. Whether it was this that caused the problems, or the simple fact that the company, once obtaining approximately 30 million, would have to earn that back to be even back to 0, it is difficult to tell.

When Greenspun took on the VC's, which was a gutsy move which ended up in court as fully described here, he failed to take the company back, but it is conjectured that he got a nice settlement in the article.

What do people think? Was his culture a winner? He comes in for quite a bit of stick about his methods to get the best out of software engineers (work them extremely hard, don't give them a family life, but give them fishbowls, toys, and the hope of a ferrari). I personally don't think they should have gone to the VC's but I don't blame him. The idea of cashing out with millions personally would probably make me do the same thing. However, that's the one thing you've got to realise. If you go to VC's, you have got to read the contract, and try to imagine that the impossible could happen.

thenerd.

I suggest checking out Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing. It is available in both online and print versions (in addition to being a fantastic read).

Check out OpenACS, continuing development of ArsDigita's Arsgitia Community System. They've had discussion, commenting and other community/collaboration features for years and there are people working on adding more wiki and weblog-like functionality.

He's actually built successful community sites, not just written generalizations

Read the section entitled Why Don't Customers Wise Up? (Search for this section title within the page, as there was no internal anchor to link.)

It seems that since the 1960s, PHBs talked up the scarcity of IT staff to stimulate demand and cause a glut, so that they could drive down programmer salaries to reflect the 'true' importance of management to the managed i.e. managers earning multiples of their technical s[(a)(er)]vants.

From the article:
"The only problem with this arrangement is that most of today's working programmers don't know how to program."
Since there was such 'demand,' educational institutions found more applicants to CS courses. Due to the greed of the administrators who run these bodies, they lowered standards to let more people in.

In the UK, this has resulted in the merry farce which is the GCSE, A level and degree certification conveyor belt. Every Summer, we have Big Brother trumpeting the record number of students with higher grades, only to be confronted with academics complaining about the quality of undergraduates. The people at the coal face are then roundly denounced as elitists. I consider myself a plebeian, having experienced the vicissitudes of homelessness, which fact contributes even further to my anger at having been educationally shortchanged.

One need look no further than the consultancies to see the policies of absolute greed and pig ignorance in action. (Apologies to those of a porcine persuasion). In Britain, for this year alone, hundreds of millions of taxpayers' pounds have been squandered by Big Brother on their nepotic friends in industry who can't fscking even be held accountable. EDS, Siemens, Andersen, DeLoitte, Price Waterhouse. The list goes on and on.

ArsDigita uses Redhat+Oracle+AOLserver in its Arsdigita Community System (ACS).

Phillup Greenspun (MIT) Started the company. Now he sits on the board as a major shareholder, he mentioned in an email "I didn't get along with all the business men and venture capitolist I highered."

As far as i know this is the biggest company that sets up Big Business RDBMS on linux. So far Siemens and The World Bank are thier biggest coustomers.

I'm just learning ACS now and it's quite interesting, however the fact that AOLserver uses TCL scares some away.

Oh, it works by the way! AOL serves over ten thousand hits per second with this architecture.

I tend to post in point form, perhaps i'm just lazy or busy or somthing, hope this info is useful to someone, it's my 1st /. post...

(although that particular site took a while to return with anything... hmmm)

ACS is now licensed through ADPL (Arsdigita Public License). It's open source, and I don't see how it fits into definition of "soon to be proprietary product". As always, the code which is now open-source under ADPL will always remain available under same licensing terms.

Sorry, I got caught up replying to the "Why Perl" comment, and then I realized I should have just posted this link.

Greenspun has a PhD from MIT (good paper credentials) and has made a hojillion dollars building websites (real world success). Sadly, the company he started was taken over my Sinister Venture Capitalists (TM).

Great book, and it's free. You can also buy a copy if you want. It's big and pretty. That's important.
:-)

Seriously, the book includes a good bibliography, and links to books he's written on SQL and other things. They're also free. You really can't go wrong starting here.

Now, go get yourself a Linux box (I plan to get an extra one free Saturday from my beloved Hal-PC at their giveaway), set up a webserver and a database and get to work!!
:-)

HTH,

You're asking about "enterprise class open source applications" built on top of Tomcat (or some other servlet engine)? You should take a look at the Arsdigita Community System which is open-source and provides most of the things you're asking for (Content Management System, for example). It's being actively developed and yes, I'm working for Arsdigita.

I would really love to hear from Philip Greenspun and his experience with ArsDigita.

I think Venture Capitalists, with this behavior, will f*ck themselves out of a job. Check out the SBA They give very favorable terms. --BlueRain

The Internet is supposed to be...

• TO EMPOWER K-12 LEARNERS
  
• the promise of our future
  
• to save the American medical system
  
• a global, multipurpose, multimedia communications network
  
• to strengthen Hispanic families and communities
  
• to open the door for competition
  
• for English as a Second Language
  
• for freedom from sysadmin
  
• to transfer the power of the high-speed network effectively to society at large
  
• to compete successfully with Fortune 500 companies
  
• To center learning around the student instead of the classroom
  
• to regain the tails of the normal distribution
  
• to test the founding vision of the framers of the Constitution
  
• to propel the economy forward
  
• a truly democratic means of communication.
  
• to increase mail usage and expand paper consumption
  

On the contrary, AOLServer is really quite good. It's tight binding with Tcl makes it possible to pull of some incredibly elegant things in just a few short lines of code. If you want to see some good examples of AOLServer (which is OSS, by the way) in use, check out photo.net, arsdigita.com, or anything else done by Philip Greenspun/ArsDigita. He swears by it, and for good reason. The original poster's page doesn't do it much (any?) justice.

What about people who are thinking about getting into web publishing? I would suggest Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing , which is a generic look at techniques for and design issues for putting together effective websites. Very common sense advice. The entire book is also available online.

God I hate PowerPoint. What awful, awful software.

There was a great article about it in the May 28 issue of The New Yorker, but their website is impossible to use (tiny fonts, no search feature, and spotty access to the archives) and Google can only get me as far as this snippet. Still, it gets the idea across:

"PowerPoint, which can be found on two hundred and fifty million computers around the world, is software you impose on other people," Ian Parker writes in "Absolute PowerPoint." Its use has become so pervasive, Parker suggests, that it is changing the way we think, not just about work but about life. One defense-industry consultant, Parker reports, put together a presentation entitled "Family Matters," when her daughters weren't cleaning up their bedrooms or doing their chores. It ran to eighteen pages. "The briefing was given only once, last fall," Parker writes. "The experience was so upsetting to her children that the threat of a second showing was enough to make one of the...girls burst into tears." This may be extreme, but it is not unusual. "PowerPoint also has a private, interior influence," Parker contends. "It edits ideas. It is, almost surreptitiously, a business manual as well as a business suit, with an opinion -- an oddly pedantic, prescriptive opinion -- about the way we should think." This was not the intention of the programmers, who originally designed PowerPoint to "get rid of the intermediaries ---graphic designers --- and never mind the consequences," Parker writes. As the use of PowerPoint spread, though, its programmers began to tinker with the content as well as the form of presentations. "We said, 'What we need is some automatic content!'" one former Microsoft developer tells Parker. "'Punch the button and you'll have a presentation.'" And the name that was chosen for this feature --- AutoContent --- "was meant as a joke," Parker reports. "But Microsoft took the idea and kept the name --- a rare example of a product named in outright mockery of its target customers."

Why people use PowerPoint over sadly unknown but clearly superior alternatives -- from simple HTML pages to WimpyPoint to full blown Flash movies -- is completely beyond me. None of the three alternatives above suffers PowerPoints drawbacks: hugely bloated (ever try to put a presentation on a floppy? Hah!), fiercely constraining, and most importantly in this context (again, this rant was launched because of the presentations at an Open Source conference), spawn of the Beast From Redmond.

So, why use it? I see no benefit.

Gah....

Anyway, I'd love to see these slides, but there's no way in hell I'm installing that damned software for it. Too bad that the Open Source speakers didn't think of the Open Source users....

Management calling good coders Primma Donnas always gets on my nerves for a variety of reasons. Many people (including Phil Greenspun) have quoted the confounding statistic that an excellent programmer is typically 10 times more productive than an average programmer.

Yet I'm yet to hear of a coder who brings in almost half a million dollars in salary. Instead I hear of good coders making about $10K or so more than mediocre HTML jockeys and VB h4x0rs. It continually astounds me that the U.S. claims to be a capitalist society but in this one area we act like everyone is equal when they clearly are not.

Bruce Perens, Linus Torvalds, Bill Joy and Alan Cox could probably code in one weekend what it would take a team of coders a week to do, yet they at best are not even making twice what an intern at a Fortuen 500 makes. Then to add insult to injury the overpaid MBAs who have wrecked the tech industry now have the nerve to call them Primma Donnas.

*spitting noise*

--

I can see a business model based around free software and high-priced consistency like Arsdigita being a somewhat feasible business model, but generic products like office suites or firewall tools in a shrink wrap aren't going to get any market share on open platforms, because there are free alternatives.

The other problem is the mentality of people running GNULinux or *BSD just doesn't lend them to pay for stuff.

I can't see the gaming market for the GNULinux desktop ever making anyone rich. Same goes for the office suites. Console gaming is console gaming, the market is totally different than desktop platform gaming. It really doesn't matter to the 12 year old kid what OS runs on his console, and he doesn't wanna be able to create Word documents on it.

Anyway... I think that as a Software Dude, that wants to make a living working on GNULinux or *BSD, the only companies that are going to survive are one's that:

• have a good chunk of open-source code that is better than other products out there
• have a high enough profile to use the existing installations of their open-source software as marketting
• have enough cash flow to completely write off the people that will just download their software that they paid employees to write, and never give them a cent
• generate that cash flow through customization and consulting
• hire smart enough people and train them on the product so that they get the consulting work implementing their product, because regardless of the price they charge the customer gets their money's worth
• have clients that believe enough in open-source that will be willing to pay a consultant to customize an application and release those changes as open-source

I can see a business model based around free software and high-priced consistency like Arsdigita being a somewhat feasible business model, but generic products like office suites or firewall tools in a shrink wrap aren't going to get any market share on open platforms, because there are free alternatives.

The other problem is the mentality of people running GNULinux or *BSD just doesn't lend them to pay for stuff.

I can't see the gaming market for the GNULinux desktop ever making anyone rich. Same goes for the office suites. Console gaming is console gaming, the market is totally different than desktop platform gaming. It really doesn't matter to the 12 year old kid what OS runs on his console, and he doesn't wanna be able to create Word documents on it.

Anyway... I think that as a Software Dude, that wants to make a living working on GNULinux or *BSD, the only companies that are going to survive are one's that:

• have a good chunk of open-source code that is better than other products out there
• have a high enough profile to use the existing installations of their open-source software as marketting
• have enough cash flow to completely write off the people that will just download their software that they paid employees to write, and never give them a cent
• generate that cash flow through customization and consulting
• hire smart enough people and train them on the product so that they get the consulting work implementing their product, because regardless of the price they charge the customer gets their money's worth
• have clients that believe enough in open-source that will be willing to pay a consultant to customize an application and release those changes as open-source

why this shouldn't be used too much

that forcing a surfer through an entry-tunnel to access a website is Bad Practice (tm)

and that most sites are actually being visited for their content, rather than their flashy look (no pun intended)

A very interesting point of view on this subject can be found in Phillip Greenspun's Guide to web publishing. Phillip even practices what he preaches on photo.net.

ARSDigita is just another company so whats the big hooplah about. So they have ties with software, web resources, etc.

Yahoo is the same shit, yet when they were shitted on, no one posted about the possible demise of Yahoo. Whats the big difference its just another corporation, and they haven't done anything to improve the Internet as a whole anyFsckingway, so who gives a damn?

Philip has written a great book on designing and deploying web services and made it available online as well as in print. He also makes all the source code for the toolkit that his company uses available free of charge and licensed under the GPL. He, and other people in his company, have written numerous articles at the ArsDigita Systems Journal including his book, a tutorial on SQL, and a tutorial on TCL. He gives you every resource that they use to compete with them, including the ability to educate yourself on their tools and methodology.

ArsDigita also helps to fund ArsDigita University which is starting to make lectures and information on classes available online. Just because you can't physically attend doesn't mean you can't learn what they are teaching. They even sponsor getting kids into development and give away a $10,000US prize in a yearly competition they hold. In their words ArsDigita "recognizes achievement by young people who have built and maintained web services. Web programmers 18 and younger are rewarded for creating non-commercial sites that are useful, educational, and collaborative."

Philip and ArsDigita also give free two-week long boot camps on how to use their software, as well as online web seminars and free one day lectures around the world. Philip was recently here in the San Francisco area and I had a chance to attend one of his seminars.

In short, Philip and ArsDigita have done a lot more than just try to make a lot of money. Unlike Yahoo who just uses free software, Philip and aD actually create it and then go a step further -- They train you on how to use it and make a slew of resources about it and related technologies available on their dime and no cost to you. That's a lot more than most companies can say.

ARSDigita is just another company so whats the big hooplah about. So they have ties with software, web resources, etc.

Yahoo is the same shit, yet when they were shitted on, no one posted about the possible demise of Yahoo. Whats the big difference its just another corporation, and they haven't done anything to improve the Internet as a whole anyFsckingway, so who gives a damn?

Philip has written a great book on designing and deploying web services and made it available online as well as in print. He also makes all the source code for the toolkit that his company uses available free of charge and licensed under the GPL. He, and other people in his company, have written numerous articles at the ArsDigita Systems Journal including his book, a tutorial on SQL, and a tutorial on TCL. He gives you every resource that they use to compete with them, including the ability to educate yourself on their tools and methodology.

ArsDigita also helps to fund ArsDigita University which is starting to make lectures and information on classes available online. Just because you can't physically attend doesn't mean you can't learn what they are teaching. They even sponsor getting kids into development and give away a $10,000US prize in a yearly competition they hold. In their words ArsDigita "recognizes achievement by young people who have built and maintained web services. Web programmers 18 and younger are rewarded for creating non-commercial sites that are useful, educational, and collaborative."

Philip and ArsDigita also give free two-week long boot camps on how to use their software, as well as online web seminars and free one day lectures around the world. Philip was recently here in the San Francisco area and I had a chance to attend one of his seminars.

In short, Philip and ArsDigita have done a lot more than just try to make a lot of money. Unlike Yahoo who just uses free software, Philip and aD actually create it and then go a step further -- They train you on how to use it and make a slew of resources about it and related technologies available on their dime and no cost to you. That's a lot more than most companies can say.

ARSDigita is just another company so whats the big hooplah about. So they have ties with software, web resources, etc.

Yahoo is the same shit, yet when they were shitted on, no one posted about the possible demise of Yahoo. Whats the big difference its just another corporation, and they haven't done anything to improve the Internet as a whole anyFsckingway, so who gives a damn?

Philip has written a great book on designing and deploying web services and made it available online as well as in print. He also makes all the source code for the toolkit that his company uses available free of charge and licensed under the GPL. He, and other people in his company, have written numerous articles at the ArsDigita Systems Journal including his book, a tutorial on SQL, and a tutorial on TCL. He gives you every resource that they use to compete with them, including the ability to educate yourself on their tools and methodology.

ArsDigita also helps to fund ArsDigita University which is starting to make lectures and information on classes available online. Just because you can't physically attend doesn't mean you can't learn what they are teaching. They even sponsor getting kids into development and give away a $10,000US prize in a yearly competition they hold. In their words ArsDigita "recognizes achievement by young people who have built and maintained web services. Web programmers 18 and younger are rewarded for creating non-commercial sites that are useful, educational, and collaborative."

Philip and ArsDigita also give free two-week long boot camps on how to use their software, as well as online web seminars and free one day lectures around the world. Philip was recently here in the San Francisco area and I had a chance to attend one of his seminars.

In short, Philip and ArsDigita have done a lot more than just try to make a lot of money. Unlike Yahoo who just uses free software, Philip and aD actually create it and then go a step further -- They train you on how to use it and make a slew of resources about it and related technologies available on their dime and no cost to you. That's a lot more than most companies can say.

ARSDigita is just another company so whats the big hooplah about. So they have ties with software, web resources, etc.

Yahoo is the same shit, yet when they were shitted on, no one posted about the possible demise of Yahoo. Whats the big difference its just another corporation, and they haven't done anything to improve the Internet as a whole anyFsckingway, so who gives a damn?

Philip has written a great book on designing and deploying web services and made it available online as well as in print. He also makes all the source code for the toolkit that his company uses available free of charge and licensed under the GPL. He, and other people in his company, have written numerous articles at the ArsDigita Systems Journal including his book, a tutorial on SQL, and a tutorial on TCL. He gives you every resource that they use to compete with them, including the ability to educate yourself on their tools and methodology.

ArsDigita also helps to fund ArsDigita University which is starting to make lectures and information on classes available online. Just because you can't physically attend doesn't mean you can't learn what they are teaching. They even sponsor getting kids into development and give away a $10,000US prize in a yearly competition they hold. In their words ArsDigita "recognizes achievement by young people who have built and maintained web services. Web programmers 18 and younger are rewarded for creating non-commercial sites that are useful, educational, and collaborative."

Philip and ArsDigita also give free two-week long boot camps on how to use their software, as well as online web seminars and free one day lectures around the world. Philip was recently here in the San Francisco area and I had a chance to attend one of his seminars.

In short, Philip and ArsDigita have done a lot more than just try to make a lot of money. Unlike Yahoo who just uses free software, Philip and aD actually create it and then go a step further -- They train you on how to use it and make a slew of resources about it and related technologies available on their dime and no cost to you. That's a lot more than most companies can say.

ARSDigita is just another company so whats the big hooplah about. So they have ties with software, web resources, etc.

Yahoo is the same shit, yet when they were shitted on, no one posted about the possible demise of Yahoo. Whats the big difference its just another corporation, and they haven't done anything to improve the Internet as a whole anyFsckingway, so who gives a damn?

Philip has written a great book on designing and deploying web services and made it available online as well as in print. He also makes all the source code for the toolkit that his company uses available free of charge and licensed under the GPL. He, and other people in his company, have written numerous articles at the ArsDigita Systems Journal including his book, a tutorial on SQL, and a tutorial on TCL. He gives you every resource that they use to compete with them, including the ability to educate yourself on their tools and methodology.

ArsDigita also helps to fund ArsDigita University which is starting to make lectures and information on classes available online. Just because you can't physically attend doesn't mean you can't learn what they are teaching. They even sponsor getting kids into development and give away a $10,000US prize in a yearly competition they hold. In their words ArsDigita "recognizes achievement by young people who have built and maintained web services. Web programmers 18 and younger are rewarded for creating non-commercial sites that are useful, educational, and collaborative."

Philip and ArsDigita also give free two-week long boot camps on how to use their software, as well as online web seminars and free one day lectures around the world. Philip was recently here in the San Francisco area and I had a chance to attend one of his seminars.

In short, Philip and ArsDigita have done a lot more than just try to make a lot of money. Unlike Yahoo who just uses free software, Philip and aD actually create it and then go a step further -- They train you on how to use it and make a slew of resources about it and related technologies available on their dime and no cost to you. That's a lot more than most companies can say.

ARSDigita is just another company so whats the big hooplah about. So they have ties with software, web resources, etc.

Yahoo is the same shit, yet when they were shitted on, no one posted about the possible demise of Yahoo. Whats the big difference its just another corporation, and they haven't done anything to improve the Internet as a whole anyFsckingway, so who gives a damn?

Philip has written a great book on designing and deploying web services and made it available online as well as in print. He also makes all the source code for the toolkit that his company uses available free of charge and licensed under the GPL. He, and other people in his company, have written numerous articles at the ArsDigita Systems Journal including his book, a tutorial on SQL, and a tutorial on TCL. He gives you every resource that they use to compete with them, including the ability to educate yourself on their tools and methodology.

ArsDigita also helps to fund ArsDigita University which is starting to make lectures and information on classes available online. Just because you can't physically attend doesn't mean you can't learn what they are teaching. They even sponsor getting kids into development and give away a $10,000US prize in a yearly competition they hold. In their words ArsDigita "recognizes achievement by young people who have built and maintained web services. Web programmers 18 and younger are rewarded for creating non-commercial sites that are useful, educational, and collaborative."

Philip and ArsDigita also give free two-week long boot camps on how to use their software, as well as online web seminars and free one day lectures around the world. Philip was recently here in the San Francisco area and I had a chance to attend one of his seminars.

In short, Philip and ArsDigita have done a lot more than just try to make a lot of money. Unlike Yahoo who just uses free software, Philip and aD actually create it and then go a step further -- They train you on how to use it and make a slew of resources about it and related technologies available on their dime and no cost to you. That's a lot more than most companies can say.

ARSDigita is just another company so whats the big hooplah about. So they have ties with software, web resources, etc.

Yahoo is the same shit, yet when they were shitted on, no one posted about the possible demise of Yahoo. Whats the big difference its just another corporation, and they haven't done anything to improve the Internet as a whole anyFsckingway, so who gives a damn?

Philip has written a great book on designing and deploying web services and made it available online as well as in print. He also makes all the source code for the toolkit that his company uses available free of charge and licensed under the GPL. He, and other people in his company, have written numerous articles at the ArsDigita Systems Journal including his book, a tutorial on SQL, and a tutorial on TCL. He gives you every resource that they use to compete with them, including the ability to educate yourself on their tools and methodology.

ArsDigita also helps to fund ArsDigita University which is starting to make lectures and information on classes available online. Just because you can't physically attend doesn't mean you can't learn what they are teaching. They even sponsor getting kids into development and give away a $10,000US prize in a yearly competition they hold. In their words ArsDigita "recognizes achievement by young people who have built and maintained web services. Web programmers 18 and younger are rewarded for creating non-commercial sites that are useful, educational, and collaborative."

Philip and ArsDigita also give free two-week long boot camps on how to use their software, as well as online web seminars and free one day lectures around the world. Philip was recently here in the San Francisco area and I had a chance to attend one of his seminars.

In short, Philip and ArsDigita have done a lot more than just try to make a lot of money. Unlike Yahoo who just uses free software, Philip and aD actually create it and then go a step further -- They train you on how to use it and make a slew of resources about it and related technologies available on their dime and no cost to you. That's a lot more than most companies can say.

ARSDigita is just another company so whats the big hooplah about. So they have ties with software, web resources, etc.

Yahoo is the same shit, yet when they were shitted on, no one posted about the possible demise of Yahoo. Whats the big difference its just another corporation, and they haven't done anything to improve the Internet as a whole anyFsckingway, so who gives a damn?

Philip has written a great book on designing and deploying web services and made it available online as well as in print. He also makes all the source code for the toolkit that his company uses available free of charge and licensed under the GPL. He, and other people in his company, have written numerous articles at the ArsDigita Systems Journal including his book, a tutorial on SQL, and a tutorial on TCL. He gives you every resource that they use to compete with them, including the ability to educate yourself on their tools and methodology.

ArsDigita also helps to fund ArsDigita University which is starting to make lectures and information on classes available online. Just because you can't physically attend doesn't mean you can't learn what they are teaching. They even sponsor getting kids into development and give away a $10,000US prize in a yearly competition they hold. In their words ArsDigita "recognizes achievement by young people who have built and maintained web services. Web programmers 18 and younger are rewarded for creating non-commercial sites that are useful, educational, and collaborative."

Philip and ArsDigita also give free two-week long boot camps on how to use their software, as well as online web seminars and free one day lectures around the world. Philip was recently here in the San Francisco area and I had a chance to attend one of his seminars.

In short, Philip and ArsDigita have done a lot more than just try to make a lot of money. Unlike Yahoo who just uses free software, Philip and aD actually create it and then go a step further -- They train you on how to use it and make a slew of resources about it and related technologies available on their dime and no cost to you. That's a lot more than most companies can say.

I owe Philip Greenspun a lot. Philip Greenspun is personally responsible for changing how I looked at technology, programming, as well as changing how I looked at Life.

My students owe Philip Greenspun a lot as well; If it weren't for his article on software professionalism, I don't know that I would be teaching free programming classes to the public.

It's terrible and saddening to see ArsDigita becoming just another silly company.

On the upside ("Long Live the King"), I look forward to seeing where he decides to turn his life next. Maybe this is actually a turn for the better. Maybe he'll be a little more humble, not just in thought and deed, but also speech. Maybe he'll write about his trip to India. Maybe he'll become a spokesperson for Nikon. Maybe he'll just relax, read, and mull over some books.

Regardless, I feel very priveledged to have been able to read what he has written, and to have heard him lecture, and look forward to his new life.

If you approach the powers thay be the right way they will see this as a cheap way of keeping you in the company.

When negotiating such a deal, remember that it's expensive to have good hosting and connectivity but it's cheap to share the excess bandwith of such a connection.

The largest scale example of this is Philip Greenspun who not only uses what equals a T1 of MIT bandwith but received a large HP9000 server for free to run the site.

I'll say something. Really, there is so little to this guy. In that management article there is a paragraph: "Your business success will depend on the extent to which programmers essentially live at your office. For this to be a common choice, your office had better be nicer than the average programmer's home. There are two ways to achieve this result. One is to hire programmers who live in extremely shabby apartments. The other is to create a nice office. Microsoft understands this. In the early 1990s they did radio spots with John Cleese as a spokesman. One of the main points of the ad was to ridicule the cheap open-plan offices in which programmers were traditionally housed and promote the fact that at Microsoft each developer gets a plush personal office." The remark about shabby apartments are pretty snotty. Oh, it was humor.

If there is anything right about this paragraph it is the idea that personal offices are good. I'm in an organization with individual offices and I feel there is no substitute for the ways it improves our productivity.

Then Phil gets into various dimensions of improving the office and, guess what, that's the last mention of personal offices. He talks about Aeron chairs, and spreading desks apart, and pin ball machines.

Anyone who works in their own office will tell you that those other things are nothing compared to their own office. This is major league hand waving to me.

I can't figure out why this is such a big deal with you guys... "my god, he recommends buying Aerons! You see, what a spendthrift!".

It is followed by more nothing attempts to keep the programmers shackled to their job.

Looking at the rest of the article, there are actually a number of things in it that really should be obvious, common sense, but really aren't always attended to. The place where I'm working right now, the landlord turns off the HVAC at 6pm sharp. By 7pm or so it's getting so hot and stuffy I can't breath. This being a moderne office building, there ain't no windows I can open. You would think it would be in their interests to make it easy for me to hang out until midnight, but somehow they can't get their act together on the simple stuff like this.

Anyway, I'll skip the rest of your rant... you may have some points in there, but it looks to me like there's a lot of hand-waving going on about Philips hand-waving...

Like look at what wuliao was saying originally:

I work at aD, and I've been here since the beginning a few years ago. The amount of misinformation on this staggers me, and the amount of blind Philip worship makes me ill. The posts by Philip represent one side of the story (his), but are far from being the complete story.

The original focus, which remains the same today, was pooled database connectivity in a threaded webserver. What this means is if you interact heavily with the database, the overhead of db client creation is removed. Single process architecture makes caching simple.
Apache only recently gained db pooling, and caching is still done out-of-process, eg, Squid. Naviserver had this back in 1995. Given that Apache is process-based, not threaded, Apache's pooling is still inferior.
Don't switch just for language wanking; that means nothing for user experience. But for a site with heavy database interaction, aolserver can show an order of magnitude performance improvement over Apache.

Visit philg's intro for more background. (Oh, and if you can't stand Tcl, Perl & Phython versions are being developed.)

All the ad hominem attacks aside, Greenspun is a writer and thinker of significant clarity. Agree with him or disagree with him, but you always know where he stands and what he believes in. Even though I don't know anyone at ArsDigita and had no idea he'd left, I knew when I read this stupid piece of corporate bullshit that the real Philip Greenspun could never have had anything to do with it. Think I'll use it next time I teach George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language." So, I'm relieved. Relieved to know that someone like Philip Greenspun hadn't turned into just another corporate hack who can't even say what his company is about without confusing more than he clarified.

All the ad hominem attacks aside, Greenspun is a writer and thinker of significant clarity. Agree with him or disagree with him, but you always know where he stands and what he believes in. Even though I don't know anyone at ArsDigita and had no idea he'd left, I knew when I read this stupid piece of corporate bullshit that the real Philip Greenspun could never have had anything to do with it. Think I'll use it next time I teach George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language." So, I'm relieved. Relieved to know that someone like Philip Greenspun hadn't turned into just another corporate hack who can't even say what his company is about without confusing more than he clarified.

Philip Greenspun saw this server, liked it (he really likes Tcl for some reason), and decided to use it for the ArsDigita Community System. He (or someone else) also talked to the people at AOL and convinced them to make it Free (speech). So they started working on taking out the bits that they didn't have the right to distribute, with an eye to making version 3 Open Source. And that's basically what happened.

All in all, I think there are only a handful of users of AOLserver, most notably AOL and ArsDigita. It's been a while since I've read it, but I believe he talks about it in Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing. BTW, there are a lot more links, resources, online books, etc, available from the ArsDigita site. (I'm not sure how long they've had it out; probably between two and four years. Less time for the version with source.)

--

Philip Greenspun saw this server, liked it (he really likes Tcl for some reason), and decided to use it for the ArsDigita Community System. He (or someone else) also talked to the people at AOL and convinced them to make it Free (speech). So they started working on taking out the bits that they didn't have the right to distribute, with an eye to making version 3 Open Source. And that's basically what happened.

All in all, I think there are only a handful of users of AOLserver, most notably AOL and ArsDigita. It's been a while since I've read it, but I believe he talks about it in Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing. BTW, there are a lot more links, resources, online books, etc, available from the ArsDigita site. (I'm not sure how long they've had it out; probably between two and four years. Less time for the version with source.)

--

I'll say something. Really, there is so little to this guy. In that management article there is a paragraph:

"Your business success will depend on the extent to which programmers essentially live at your office. For this to be a common choice, your office had better be nicer than the average programmer's home. There are two ways to achieve this result. One is to hire programmers who live in extremely shabby apartments. The other is to create a nice office. Microsoft understands this. In the early 1990s they did radio spots with John Cleese as a spokesman. One of the main points of the ad was to ridicule the cheap open-plan offices in which programmers were traditionally housed and promote the fact that at Microsoft each developer gets a plush personal office."

The remark about shabby apartments are pretty snotty. Oh, it was humor. If there is anything right about this paragraph it is the idea that personal offices are good. I'm in an organization with individual offices and I feel there is no substitute for the ways it improves our productivity.

Then Phil gets into various dimensions of improving the office and, guess what, that's the last mention of personal offices. He talks about Aeron chairs, and spreading desks apart, and pin ball machines. Anyone who works in their own office will tell you that those other things are nothing compared to their own office. This is major league hand waving to me. It is followed by more nothing attempts to keep the programmers shackled to their job.

And back to working: the idea is to work programmers 70 hours a week but that includes "25 hours of coordination and structure comprehension time." Does that mean 25 hours of meetings? I don't feel that he clarifies what these 25 hours of whatever are for. He also leaves out the part that the programmer is paid $100,000 a year and gets 5 weeks vacation. He mentions that in a post to slashdot, but didn't include that here. He also posted that this is about getting the best out of the next Linus Torvalds and it isn't about regular programmers; and something about getting a person to work 70 hours, but the time could include learning the piano. I can't figure out who he is writing about, or who he's addressing the article to.

It's stupid ideas, based on false or absurd presumptions. It's someone who just likes to hear himself talk. Hand-waving. It all just gets real smelly to me, and this is just the tiniest part of the article and his followup posts. I've reached my limit now.

I've been a fan of Philip's writing for several years now, starting with Travel's with Samantha, and I'd like to stand up for his side a bit.

From what I've read from Philip, he'll be the first to agree with you about his not being a capable SW engineering god, SW architect or manager. He is, however, a guy who had a vision on how the Web could benefit people and worked to make that vision a reality in photo.net, with the assistance of his (more competant and qualified, he'll readily admit I think, friends). He took that core and built a company doing what no other dot-com was doing -- return a real profit.

Now there's a power struggle at the top. This is a side effect of bad planning, fast growth, and being a beautiful woman (i.e. a company with lots of revenue and real profits), and unavoidable in business. What did the Japanese say? Business is war? Very true -- business, like war, is a great asshole magnet, and as the dust flies around everybody loses sight of who is the asshole and who isn't. Wildly pointing fingers results in nothing.

I don't claim to know Philip intimately, I can only talk to the impressions I get from his writings and from the handful of emails I've traded with him. I think I can understand his desire to regain control of what he still sees as "his" company -- I've watched the aD web site degenerate over time from a honest, informative site to an overblown, marketeered, PR-driven blandness that I don't visit anymore (I go straight to developers.arsdigita.com now) Philip wants things to be the same as they were in the beginning (which, unfortunately, they can never be once you accept that check from outside investors), and he's going to give it the old college try.

While you might find his writings a lot of "hand-waving", I think you (and the "capable software engineers" you mention) might need to get out in the air more often. To my mind, one of the biggest problems we have is the fact that software engineers are running things, either covertly or not-so-covertly, and to have someone with an ability to bridge that gap between management and techs is *extremely* valuable. I'm sure aD has plenty of "software engineers***" -- have you got any usibility experts on staff? Interaction designers? Someone who cares more about the end user than the server? Until you have that, you're a programming shop, and no force on earth is capable of "managing" a crowd of programmers. At best you can get all of their heads pointed in the right direction

*** Software engineers... pah! My dad is an electrical engineer (>5V). My girlfriend's dad is a civil engineer. I've got a cousin in aerospace engineering, an uncle with a PhD in electrical engineering(<=5V), and a good friend in mechanical engineering. They have codes, rules, guidelines to keep their stuff running, powered, in the air or out of the muck, and ultimately their stuff either works or it doesn't.
Software engineer... you're a fucking programmer, so get over it or accept (financial) responsibility when my word processor crashes.
"Beware by whom you are called sane."