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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.
The is the first press release I've ever seen from a publicly traded comapny that consisted entirely of bullet points...
#!
arsDigita has great engineers, and pretty good technology (a few bugs, but mostly worked out now). The really bad part (and what drove aD into the ground) was bad management. As the only (AFAIK) profitable open source based company, Redhat should know a thing or two about running a business well. Hopefully they'll be able to restructure the aD assets and personnel, and really add to the community.
"You have the option of insanity. I do not. And that makes me crazy!" - Brian to Angela, My So-Called Life
I believe that's the first time I've ever seen the word "fetishistically" used. I will definitely have to work that into my everyday speech.
- ArsDigita software enables content creation through collaboration
- ArsDigita software and consulting expand Red Hat's ability to deliver the benefits of collaboration to the enterprise
Okay, I can understand those reasons, but these?Just think... Redhat could rename ACS to RCS (RedHat Community System) and then Revision Control System would be out of business...
:)b
Of course, this is probabyl why they are not planning to rename ACS
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
* RedHat recognizes that press releases are boring.
* RedHat has long been a proponent of boring press releases.
* In light of this historic relationship, this press release will bore the hell out of everyone who reads it.
is this really the right time to buy a new, troubled company? I applaud the effort to save Ars Digita, but there is a reason it had gone under...
Somehow, I think a company should refrain from acquisitions until it is comfortably in the black itself. I'd hate for RedHat to burn through its reserves faster than necesary.
It looks ot me like Red Hat wanted some Java programmers in its payroll. Since Sun is now starting to talk Linux more, and a lot of people think that there is a 'showdown' brewing between Java/J2EE and .NET, Red Hat is afraid of being marginalized between the two. Now they have a Java toolkit and the programmers to use it.
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
See this for background about ArsDigita:
ArsDigita: From Start-Up to Bust-Up by Philip Greenspun
Bush's education improvements were
I've heard a lot about CMSs and ArsDigita in particular, but I'm not entirely up on my CMS terminology.
I poked around on the ArsDigita pages, but what I found was a lot of marketing and buzzword crap, and no really good to the point explanation on what it is. I don't have the time to read all the marketing B.S., so I'm hoping somebody here can get straight to the point and tell me what this is all about.
If I were to download and install the ArsDigita CMS, what exactly would that buy me?
Is it a collection of APIs for developing web pages?
Is it a templating engine for generating markup?
Is it a kind of uber-Wiki?
Is it a message board system?
Is it some online collaborative environmnet like Source Forge?
It it an online publishing system like Slash or PostNuke?
Help me get to the point!
Bryan
Here is more background information about ArsDigita:
ArsDigita VCs v. Co-founders: The battle for control of ArsDigita Corporation
To me, the entire dispute was very interesting.
Bush's education improvements were
"I hope that the purchase of AD will mean a longer life then how AD's past management was handling it."
Ouch, so close! Only a few more hours and Slashdot would have had my $120! I guess you just can't lose a bet against Slashdot grammar. This time it was Hemos, not Taco. The illiteracy twins are at work again.
Compare this short notice:
Note: Sun's trademark prevents us from calling the software "ACS Java", though "ACS for the Java Platform" is OK. Hence the abbreviation "ACSJ".
To this unfortunate obfuscation at cheapbytes.com:
Looking for CDs containing the downloadable
version of the XXX XXX Linux distribution?
Hint: The name has to do with an article of clothing
to keep your head warm.
We can't call it by it's real name due to trademark law.
Our president will be providing a statement and information at
a later time regarding this subject. Please be informed about
this matter prior to jumping to any erroneous conclusions.
Cheapbytes, IANAL and this is not legal advice, but if the statement above is good enough for redhat, I wonder what could prevent you from saying something like
Note: Red Hat's trademark prevents us from calling the software "Red Hat", though "XXX XXX" is OK. Hence the abbreviation "XXX XXX".
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
People with no technical education often think they can participate sensibly in a technical enterprise. They often use an immense amount of energy hiding the fact that they cannot.
The acting performances by Academy Award winners are, literally, bland and unconvincing compared to the acting performances of managers trying to pretend that they can manage a business they don't understand.
Here is an article about that subject: An Engineer's View of Venture Capitalists
Bush's education improvements were
You mean like you can do it with Objective Caml, Standard ML, Haskell, Common Lisp, Scheme, and probably a lot of other functional languages?
Seems you need a better excuse to keep using ugly languages...
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
Looking at the press release, I noticed the following bullets:
Perhaps RedHat is moving to provide a collaborative development platform ..... ala SourceForge Enterprise edition. Could VA's SourceForge business be about to get another competitor. Of course, if you believe what their CEO had to say on their last conference call, they don't have competitors.
Cheers Koz
Proof? Of course, there cannot be one, but if you like benchmarks, compare the Great Computer Language Shootout. Though C "wins", I wouldn't exactly call it "much slower".
Wrong. For all languages I mentioned there are native compilers available. For all (AFAIK, not sure about Standard ML), there are also bytecode compilers available, for some also compilers to C.
BTW, nobody would ever be so stupid to first generate bytecode, then C out of this (At least I hope so). Oh, and assembly isn't what you compile to in the end, thats why there are assemblers.
If you talk of generating native binaries directly, you surely should try to get to know more. Here are a few:
- OCaml
- Standard ML of New Jersey
- MLton
- The Glasgow Haskell Compiler
- NHC 98
- CLisp
- CMUCL
- Stalin
I'm sure you'll find more.Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
It seems to me that you, like many linux users, are really saying "why don't they compile directly to x86!" The world is bigger than x86. Most scripting languages want to be cross-platform. And no that does not mean run on windows and linux-x86.
If you took a second to look at how much code gcc is then you would realize how fscking big a task that is.
t.
Virtual mod point to you ;-)
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
From what I understand, all the ACS/Tcl software is open source and really well documented, but the Java stuff is either not completely open, or too murky to figure out easily. Supposedly, in a last ditch effort, AD management was heading in a closed-source, packaged-solutions direction.
So, does this mean we'll get a usable ACS/Java with every Redhat boxed set? That would be cool...
In the meantime, I'm learning Tcl!
You're being way too polite... this was nothing but a face-saving move by the vulture capitalists... better than just saying the company tanked and shut its doors (which is the real truth).
I've always thought that "ArsDigita" would be a great name for a proctologist's practice.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
One of the fun things .NET does is to finaly make a fair comparison of programming languages possible. In the past the problem has been that most competitions of that type tended to be won by FORTRAN, not because the language was any good or fast but just because of the humongous amount of work that has gone into optimizing FORTRAN compilers.
C compilers have recently overtaken FORTRAN for the same reason, the effort put into optimization, plus C is quite a bit friendlier to the optimiser than FORTRAN.
With .NET you can use the same back end to produce code for practicaly any mainstream language and plenty of far from mainstream ones. It is very unlikely that there will be major performance differences between Basic, C#, and J#.It will be interesting to see how much the gap between C and Perl is narrowed.
Some of the traditional gap between the C languages and functional languages will be narrowed because CLI is a managed code environment. I suspect there is still some performance penalty to using functional languages in a functional maner but it will probably be irrelevant since you only need to use thefunctional code for the parts where functional languages help.
Case in point here is I remember once writing a prolog program to do soe stuff. Prolog was great for the real problem but when it came to all the support code to do the UI and I/O it really started to creak. Not only was the code slow, it was also really hard to write and was full of kludges (anyone remember the cut?).
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This is bullshit, as the C# bytecode virtual machine is not by any stretch of the imagination language agnostic.
Any measurement of performance will need to analyze the performance of the compiler and the "fit" with the C# VM if anything meaningful is to emerge.
I hate it when non-compiler writers pontificate on slashdot about compiler technology.
Not that it's different than with any other topic, it just happens that I'm a Compiler Expert (TM).
CMU CL does not, at any stage in the compilation process, generate intermediary C code. At least not that I've been able to see, and given that I've looked at the code generation, I'd be very surprised if it did.
Nor do SBCL, ACL, MCL, or LispWorks. There are a number of CL compilers that compile via C, such as GCL and ECLS, but you don't have to use those, there are lots of other choices.
As for the other languages, I am not sufficiently familiar with the compilers to say whether they use an intermediate C stage or not.
As I stated in the post the difference between the C familly languages is likely to be least. In particular I don't expect there to be a speed penalty for J#.
I also stated that functional languages are likely to be somewhat disadvantaged. I suspect that overall however the differences between languages will be somewhat reduced compared to traditional contests where the quality of implementation is the dominant variable being measured.
Not that it's different than with any other topic, it just happens that I'm a Compiler Expert (TM).
Pity you don't appear to be an English comprehension expert.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Well, there's ACS and OpenACS. OpenACS started as a port of the original, Oracle-based ACS to an open source database, postgresql. At the time, that was the only difference, and they were both written in TCL. However, ArsDigita decided to rewrite the ACS in Java, mostly for "buzzword compliance" marketing reasons. They stopped developing the TCL ACS, so ACS 4.x is Java. But the OpenACS folks continued developing the TCL version, so OpenACS 4.x is still TCL.
From what I understand, not all the Java ACS has been released as open source, though all the TCL stuff has.