Slashdot Mirror
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...
#!
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.
The reason is simple...
Greylock was the VC firm behind both RedHat and Ars Digita. RedHat's 'purchase' of Ars Digita allows Greylock to bury the aD losses in the RH books, as well as give a glimmer of hope to the ACS product making the light of day again.
About the Ars Digita staff going to RedHat - the total number appears to be about 10 to 15 people, so it's hardly the flood of engineers. RedHat got ACS for a song. And to think that two years ago when aD approached RedHat about putting ACS into the standard distro, they laughed in our faces.
(Yes, I was an aD wonk)
Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It's what separates us from the animals... except the weasel. -
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...
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.