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Red Hat Explains ArsDigita Purchase
hezron writes "Red Hat VP, Howard Jacobson, sent a mass email explaining their acquisition of ArsDigita's assets. Here is the press release concerning the acquisition." The press release is actually a quick FAQ about the purchase - Howard does a good job of explaining the purchase and the reasons for it. Howard's a smart guy, and I hope that the purchase of AD will mean a longer life then how AD's past management was handling it.
* Red Hat has been a strong contributor to creation and enhancement of Open Source software.
Ummm, let's see, Alan Cox on the kernel, Chris Blizzard on Mozilla, Havoc on Gnome, bero does KDE packages
Those are the ones on the top of my head. I probably forgot a few, but GNOME, gcc, and certainly Mozilla on Linux wouldn't be as far as they are today without the Red Hat guys.
Arsdigita had great engineers. Not to belittle those who are left, several of whom I have great respect for, but the majority of the developers were laid off in the acquisition.
See this for background about ArsDigita:
ArsDigita: From Start-Up to Bust-Up by Philip Greenspun
Bush's education improvements were
CMS is software to define rules to manage content production and publication. So if you were to download and install the aD CMS, you would get all of the above, except integrated. So you post content as with the publishing system like Slash, but you can collaboratively author and manage said content a la SourceForge. The previous four are part of the basic ACS system; they are necessary but not sufficient to describe CMS. Additionally, the focus of CMS is to manage content -- so the CMS software also allows you to write the control flow of content and integrate it with all the above. So rather than being limited to the rules for posting on /. or Scoop, you can define the rules for "such and such must review, approve here, loop and edit, comment, publish, email, repeat" or whatever you come up with on-site.
Of course, unless you have a penchant for Java-flavoured pain, it might be easier to use the CMS with OpenACS 4.5beta1 than the packages from a defunct company that fired most of their programmers. Still, it's nicer than what Vignette will charge you 6 figures for.
We've got one thing aD never had - a truly community-based and community-supported development effort.
aD shut their "luser" community out (pronounce it out loud and you'll understand their attitude, starting with Philip Greenspun and never modified thereafter, no matter what disputes he and the VCs might've had), refusing bug fix patches, design input, etc from the large set of folks interested in the fruit's of Philip's efforts to start a company devoted to providing an open source toolkit for web development (but based on Oracle because that's how you Get Rich Quick!)
Well ... the OpenACS community is certainly weaker in numbers and in hours (we all work for a living doing something else, typically custom client development).
But ... we stumble along and have a few coups of our own, such as an OpenACS application winning a prestigous mobile computing award in the UK recently.
I think it is great that RedHat intends to continue forth with ACSJ, if true.
But ... our little project won't care. We have a half-dozen or so companies making a living off our cooperative efforts (a socialist-capitalist mind-meld, if you will, as we have our separate businesses, compete, yet cooperate on the shared toolkit). So we're motivated to suceed.