Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

ArsDigita Founder Responds to Closing

Posted by michael on from the moral-of-the-story dept.

An anonymous reader sent in: "Net celebrity and ArsDigita founder Eve Andersson has written a brief history of the firm, documenting its downfall from her point of view. Fascinating reading, and yet another example of how a good thing can go so wrong."

4 of 298 comments (clear)

  1. Greenspun's similar comments by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Eve's story was an interesting read, and it's quite similar to the history posted by Greenspun. To make a long story short, greedy VCs drove an otherwise good company straight into the ground. Greenspun's account of the action has been removed, but a cached copy is at archive.org.

    If you want to know what really happened, I'd say that a combination of the two journals is likely a good start.

  2. Not really by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative
    In her article, Eve seems to make the assertion that the ACS-TCL was a fine product, and that the ACS-Java that replaced it was terrible because java is merely a "fashionable" language, not a useful one.

    The reality is that the TCL version of ACS was abysmal. It did not scale in any reasonable way; it leaked memory like a sieve (we actually had to write a script to restart the server periodically), and it was a pain to use. Worse than that, the code was an ad hoc spaghetti mess, full of hacks that work around bugs introduced by other hacks. For example, a common joke among the developers was that any method prefixed with "philg_" could be replaced by the pseudocode "if(rand() > 0.5) crash();" Eve's own code was in the same league.

    When the same people who wrote this monstrocity got their hands on Java, they made all the same mistakes -- hence, the failure of ACS-Java to accomplish anything remotely useful. The VCs are not the only ones to blame for aD's failure.

  3. An Invitation of OpenACS.org by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Anyone with an interest in Greenspun's ideas or the ACS should come over to OpenACS.org http://openacs.org where the FULLY GPL OpenACS 3.x and the (currently in late alpha) 4.x are developed and maintained by a talented global developer community and several companies.

    For general info read first: OpenACS FAQ
    http://openacs.org/faq/one?scope=public&faq_id=6

    Aolserver is the native webserver of OpenACS, but you can use Apache if you like
    http://openacs.org/software.adp

    A list of companies that offer various OpenACS (and ACS) services and support
    http://openacs.org/companies.adp

    We all hang out at http://openacs.org/bboard

    Come check it out for yourself.

  4. Re:Made Money... by Ed+Avis · · Score: 4, Informative

    Still, for all its faults, building a website on top of ACS Tcl was a lot easier than starting from scratch with a web server and RDMBS. So there was and is (openacs.org) real value in the software. ArsDigita didn't so much 'give it away', more like they made it free software because there was no good reason not to. The sort of customer who'd pay for a proprietary boxed website-building product wouldn't want something in Tcl, they'd go for something more buzzword-compliant. Hence the venture capitalists' attempt to create a new ACS Java.

    (There was actually an existing port of the ACS to Java, a straight translation from Tcl. It wasn't an unworkable monster like the aborted version 5.0, but certainly less successful than the Tcl version.)

    --
    -- Ed Avis ed@membled.com