ArsDigita: From Start-Up to Bust-Up (2001) | Hacker News Reader

ArsDigita: From Start-Up to Bust-Up (2001)

waxy.org

19 pointsjseliger14 comments

An amazing insider picture from 2001 about how VCs can take only a minority (30%) stake in a company and still manage to twist the terms of a shared-control agreement (executed during the funding) into a vehicle by which to take absolute control and run a company into the ground.

This is of course only one side of the story but it is presented in horrific and convincing detail.

An insightful story for founders who are considering doing a VC funding.

One of my favorite Greenspun pieces, but it's important to note that after the mess described in that article, Philip did end up with several $million, while the rest of the founders got nothing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Greenspun.

Most of Greenspun's writings are exemplary http://philip.greenspun.com/site-history

Back in 2000/2001 I was reading Greenspun's book and was strongly considering applying for ArsDigita University's second year, but then it was shut down (because of company problems). It was a very cool idea and I was planning to take a year off anyway.

http://www.aduni.org/~abangert/adu/

ArsDigita was acquired by Red Hat. It was never shut down.

counterpoint: http://michael.yoon.org/arsdigita

I created several sites using the various incarnations of ACS. I started in the TCL version and followed it to RedHat where it finished its transition to Java.

The selling point for my client was the publish-to-file system. It could dump all of the content into the filesystem as flat html files to be rsync'd to the public web servers.

isn't this almost 10 years old?

Arsdigita ACS was a cool product back then. We actually used it in a few projects. I remember coding in TCL..

The first version of our website was running OpenACS, when we launched Virtualmin as a product. It's suffering from second system effect in pretty terrifying ways. Of course, we then jumped ship to Joomla, which has a nice core but the modules are of wildly varying quality, and so ended up regretting the move, as its problems were even more pronounced and harder to fix than OpenACS. We finally settled on Drupal earlier this year, and have been mostly happy with it.

That it was written in Tcl was actually not among my many complaints about OpenACS (though there are languages I prefer, Tcl is acceptably sane and acceptably powerful).

OpenACS is a bit of a beast. AOLserver is a very nice bit of work, though. It's a pity it wasn't released as open source sooner, as it is a very nice system for creating dynamic content.

Agreed. I really enjoyed AOLServer. It was rock solid, really fast and reasonably resource efficient, did everything we needed for our particular deployment, and was reasonably well-documented.

But, it also had some limitations that made it less promising. It was intimately tied to Tcl, which is, let's be honest, not growing in popularity, had some old school architectural choices that would limit extensions and be hard to overcome (Apache had a lot of the same issues early in its life, but overcame them through brute force...when there are hundreds of active developers, all problems get smaller). It was designed for a very specific purpose, and it showed. So, I don't think it's a codebase I would consider spending time or effort on, if I didn't have really strong reasons for sticking with it.

David, what particularly did you like about AOLserver?

It's a reasonably high performance system (for what it does) with a dynamic language that is thoroughly integrated.

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