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ArsDigita Shut Down
An Anonymous Coward writes: "Looks like it's official. Philip Greenspun's ArsDigita has been closed, its assets sold to Red Hat. No word on what Red Hat is planning to do with the GPL'd ArsDigita Community System." You may remember ArsDigita from its grand plans during the dot-com boom.
See also this thread on OpenACS bboards for more info, and also Philip Greenspun's comments
Twas a good thing - just remember, however greedy you get, never succomb to the temptation of VC
ArsDigita started because in that climate it couldn't possibly fail.
Could the Slashdot posse please understand: you never met Phillip. He can't code (just READ the book and cut through the crap; analyze his 'facts'), and people who meet him instinctively dislike him. You can't run a company if everyone hates you.
If you are still taken in by Phillip and Alex, try and find an old Tcl ACS. Read the code and try to imagine trying to extend it to do useful work. Imagine trying to maintain it. To work with Phillip's code is to hate Phillip. You don't even have to meet him.
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.
Philip was a poor leader. When the company was a "startup" he was able to personally hound people into working hard. That was OK, you expect it at a startup.
But he has difficulty motivating people past a certain group size.
The nadir of his managerial prowess came in a company-wide letter where he compared the act of writing good software to be similar to the killing of jews in hitler's germany.
The analogy was bad enough, but the awful part was that he failed to see why this was offensive. And he got defensive.
This is does not give worker bees much confidence in their leader.
IT appeared to be a selection of MIT CS courses in one year, from the syllabi on the web. Many of the courses appeared to be little different from those at MIT (I took the MIT ones) and many of the instructors had MIT backgrounds. The AD course were taught in intensive serial fashion at a month each.
My guess is the MIT OpenCourseware initiative wil put a similar range on the web in upcoming years. The first installment will be this autumn according to the MIT site. (If bore through MIT's online course catalog, many syllabi are already on the web.)
The benefits of a MIT education, tempered by real-world experience, without the MIT prices, and without the MIT diploma.
My company, which grew over 2 years to 35 employees, raised 5 million dollars in venture capital, and was making over a million a year, slipped out of my control entirely earlier this year. We got an incompetent CEO put in place by our venture backers. Since we (the founders) had lost control of the board of directors there was nothing we could do about it. Of course, at the time, we needed the venture capital to fund development and attract good management, which we needed to close deals, etc. etc.
Looking back on it, at almost every stage I made lots of decisions, but most of them were the right decisions at the time. The decision to take VC funding was unavoidable at the time - we were coming into direct competition with companies that had already raised 30 to 40 million dollars. Ironically, those companies went out of business long before we did because their burn rates were outrageous.
Just my personal experiences anyway - I started out knowing a lot about technology and very little about business, and I know a lot more now. If your business if fundamentally sound without venture financing, then you don't need it. If your business is one that requires so much up front venture financing that you anticipate losing control (>50% of the shares of the company), before you get through the initial growth phase of the company, I would recommend rethinking starting that business, unless the returns seem outrageous. Use VC wisely, and only sell minority shares of the company during the early years. Once you get off the ground, you'll be in a much stronger position to negotiate for further funding anyway.
Seemed like a nice bloke, fairly genuine, and with some "big picture" views.
We're still out here. The university itself closed its doors at the end of the academic year last July, and the alumni acted to save everything we could from the ashes. We run the aduni.org site, as others have posted on this thread.
All of our content (80 GB worth) is available online -- about 275 hours of lectures, problem sets, exams, notes, and solutions -- with courses like Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (the much-loved MIT Scheme intro to CS course), Discrete Math, Algorithms, Theory, AI, Databases, and a couple of courses in Software Engineering (one of which is taught by Greenspun).
But we're a shoestring alumni organization that can't afford the bandwidth to stream the videos very well, unfortunately. So as an alternative we'll ship an 80GB hard drive full of the stuff to anyone who wants one for $220. Everything's available under the Open Content License. E-mail me (chris@aduni.org) for more details.
Thanks.
Chris
The story is no longer on the web, nor is it in google's cache but it is available from the wayback machine
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
and it's definitely not beta software. It's just the new 4.x that's still alpha. New versions don't always spring fully grown from the forehead of another corporation that did all the work... tho i guess that's the only model ybos has used.
They made the ACS(ArsDigita Community System) and offered programming for it. It is currently written in java and runs under Aolserver. What is offers is:
That is just the short skinny on acs. It basically removes 3-5 months of programming an ecomm site. Kinda like Mason on steroids.
Luckally OpenACS exists for future ACS incarnations that do NOT use oracle for its database.
So to answer no, it is not rsync and it is not for people that are "stupid." It is actually a lot of useful code. My guess is that RedHat is going to try and sell a website in a box.
......but they certainly deliver results.
I used to work for an investment web site that used Arsdigita. I was an investment analyst and was closely involved in specifying the site.
Originally development was done by one of those web development company's that came out of nowhere to be worth billions at the height of the dotcom boom (I am sure every one knows the type). They failed to deliver anything that worked after months. The little that almost worked was overcomplicated (e.g. java applets to implement cascading drop down menus).
When we switched to Arsdigita we had some pages working within weeks. These used data extracted from several different financial data feeds (which are complex) which was stored in database (which they also implemented) and content from a content management system (which they also implemented).
I worked with them both to specify the site (what we wanted on what page, how to calcualte it, where to get the data from) and to debug it (they did the code, I did the financial maths) and I thought the process they used very efficient. Maybe be it is approach rather than, say skill at coding, that made them efficient the answer to the question may depend on how you define skill.
I too was curious about this -- I have seen a number of "ArsXYZ" sites lately, so I did some searching. I assumed that "Ars" was latin, and I was right. A search on Mirriam Webster for ars produces two latin phrases: ars est celare artem (it is (true) art to conceal art), and more interestingly, ars longa, vita brevis (art is long, life is short).
From this, I have concluded that the suffix part of "ArsXYZ" names is a phony latinization of an obvious english word, and so the names come out to something like "The art of Digital", "The art of Technical", etc.
Of course, I don't know squat about latin -- this is just my best guess. Does anybody out there with a passing knowledge of latin know if my theory is correct?
ACS/tcl did (and openacs does too).