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.

Comments

`Philip Greenspun's -- not accurate

[yandros]

Philip left ArsDigita a while ago.

Re:`Philip Greenspun's -- not accurate

[Ed Avis]

Greenspun may not have been the most pleasant boss (I have no experience of this personally) or the wisest possible businessman, but compared to the VCs and managers who took over the company he looks like Solomon. It's hard to credit the amount of sheer stupidity in the running of the company after the takeover. It must have taken some real effort to take a profitable, slow-growing company and turn it into a loss-making whale which didn't have any non-vapourware products.

I think that this is a software equivalent of the Edsel story: be very wary of changing product direction solely for marketing and not technical reasons, to give customers 'what they say they want' (in this case Java). And don't let the engineers get sidetracked into building something horribly overengineered and way too complex (second system syndrome).

I agree that Philip and co.'s code is crufty and difficult to maintain: but it's an absolute dream compared to the never-finished successor in Java. FWIW, the Tcl-based ACS is still being maintained as OpenACS, they have a port to Postgres (as well as Oracle) and the forthcoming version 4.0 is progressing nicely.

Re:ArsDigita University?

[rbeattie]

From aduni.org:

The goal of ArsDigita University was to offer the world's best computer science education, at an undergraduate level, to people who were otherwise unable to obtain it. ADUni.org is now a site run by alumni of the school seeking to carry on that mission.

In 2000-2001, 34 talented and motivated college graduates attended a one-year, intensive, comprehensive undergraduate computer science program, for free. The program was an experiment in curriculum design, free education, and the effect of the Internet on the future of education. ArsDigita University was the brainchild of entrepreneur Philip Greenspun and the ArsDigita Foundation.

After one year, ArsDigita University lost funding and was forced to close its physical doors. Yet, we prefer to think of the program as dormant, not dead. As we redesign aduni.org, we will continue to host all of our course materials and will provide as much information as possible about the workings of this past year - who we are, what we did, how we did it, what worked, what didn't work, and what we're doing now.

Re:ArsDigita University?

[-brazil-]

What kind of happy pills have you been taking? In the real world, success is achieved more often than not by screwing customers, exploiting employees, bribery, and violating laws whenever you can get away with it. Of course, it's kinda ridiculous to expect the same people who do that to be plagued by a bad conscience and donate their ill-begotten wealth to a good cause...

Re:Improved software engineering through genocide

[msouth]

Well, aside from the question of taste (I, for one, think you can find a good side in this--it is an excellent reminder of what can go wrong with things like "Red Cross inspection of concentration camps", etc), it also gives you interesting insight into how Greenspun views documentation--you can have anything the hell you want going on in engineering, build a completely different product if you want, as long as you make the documentation pretty.

So, if you are ever evaluating something this guy is running, make sure you don't let the SS guide you around. Ask for code examples that implement the documentation he tries to foist on you and reserve the right to do some random audits/unguided investigation...

It would be an interesting exercise to figure out how you would get around the "SS guides" if you were looking at a company and trying to evaluate its product.