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ActiveState Founder Steps Aside
Lumpish Scholar writes "ActiveState founder Dick Hardt has quit. Or, as the press release puts it, "ActiveState Expands Board & Founder Steps Aside." No reason for the resignation was given, unless you count, "The company is looking to become a $100 million company, and they're looking for someone ... that [sic.] has that experience." ActiveState (profitably!) distributes its own proprietary products, and also both free and commercially supported versions of Perl, PHP, Python, Tcl, and XSLT, having given back significantly to the free / Open Source communities associated with those languages."
And the dominoes come tumbling down... Its a sad day when companies founded on FSF and OS sytle software and development fall apart over greed... Al la Enron anyone? Its all about the Benjamins
"Hollowpoints: When you care enough to send the very best."
How pretentious is that. Jeez. Only the MS Word grammar checker cares about the that/which distinction.
I've always had problems getting ActiveState Perl to work in Windows. Maybe it was the fault of the OmniHTTPd server, I dunno. Ah well.
Is this an attempt to "Slashdot" this company's stock?
Corporate idiots have taken over. Middle management will now move in and slow the company to a crawl.
The average business day will now be meetings, layoffs, donuts, histrionics by incompetent managers, huge debt loads and massive spending on overpriced, irrelevant crap.
All of the competent employees (the people who actually build things that other people want to buy) will be laid off, forced out, or outright fired, only to be replaced by compliant, agreeable, loyal know-it-alls, who will put their voice mail on "never reply", drench themselves in office politics, be paid higher salaries and will never be laid off.
The HR department will triple in size and hiring will be reduced by 90%.
Customers will be forgotten.
Happens every time.
And in today's marketplace, what percentage of the resumes/CVs crossing their desk do you think will be from competent, well meaning CEOs?
Hey, Carly Fiorna should be finished raid^H^H^H^Hhelping HP pretty soon. Maybe she'd be interested.
I was at the final "let's get rid of Dick Hardt" board meeting fiasco. What a mess. . . here's what happened.
/^(f[uc|rea]k)ing m.*dia.*$/$1 you/" and Rossum starts shouting about how no-one respects his space and how it was time for something completely different, blah, blah, blah. ESR starts mumbling to Guido about how Ovitz is finally going to get whacked, and then it really gets weird. . .
.
Everything starts out ok. . . typical boring board minutes stuff, somebody announces that we have a special guest and then who walks in? Fritz Hollings, Michael Eisner, Kenneth Lay and the DVD Consortium, trying to jack the whole proceedings! Well, Van Rossum and Wall completely freak out. Wall is like "get out of here you
The whole room goes silent, the lights dim, this evil-looking powerpoint starts playing and this menacing voice starts calling for the elimination of Dick Hart. . . When I saw who it was, I couldn't believe it. I always kinda figured Microsoft's investment might sink the company, but I never knew who was behind all of this - most of the other ActiveStaters never would've guessed it either...A cloaked figure emerged from the break-room shadows and revealed himself to be. .
Cowboy Neal.
(did you guess right?)