

ArsDigita: From Start-Up to Bust-Up (2001) - jseliger
http://waxy.org/random/arsdigita

======
grellas
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.

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ojbyrne
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>.

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

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RK
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/>

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

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allenbrunson
counterpoint: <http://michael.yoon.org/arsdigita>

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singlow
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.

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watt
isn't this almost 10 years old?

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

~~~
SwellJoe
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).

~~~
davidw
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.

~~~
mahmud
David, what particularly did you like about AOLserver?

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

