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Red Hat Software Businesses

Red Hat Explains ArsDigita Purchase 136

Posted by Hemos from the good-move-by-the-hat dept.
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.
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Red Hat Explains ArsDigita Purchase More

Red Hat Explains ArsDigita Purchase

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  • "Quick FAQ" is right! (Score:5, Funny)

    by sharp-bang ( 311928 ) <[sharp.bang.slashdot] [at] [gmail.com]> on Wednesday March 13, 2002 @04:40PM (#3159362) Homepage
    The is the first press release I've ever seen from a publicly traded comapny that consisted entirely of bullet points...

  • this is good for arsDigita (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ChenLing ( 20932 ) <slashdot@iloveda ... minus herbivore> on Wednesday March 13, 2002 @04:42PM (#3159377) Homepage
    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.

  • Article expanded my vocabulary! (Score:5, Funny)

    by acordes ( 69618 ) on Wednesday March 13, 2002 @04:42PM (#3159380)
    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.
  • as long as they don't ever take down http://www.arsdigita.com/books/ I'll be happy.

  • From the FAQ (Score:2, Interesting)

    by lw54 ( 73409 )
    How does the Red Hat/ArsDigita deal complement Red Hat's business?
    • 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?
    • Red Hat has been a strong contributor to creation and enhancement of Open Source software
    • Collaborative process is at the heart of Open Source software development
    • The collaborative Open Source process allows widely distributed contributors to participate
    • ArsDigita has strong Open Source roots

    • Re:From the FAQ (Score:3, Informative)

      by reaper20 ( 23396 )
      * Red Hat has been a strong contributor to creation and enhancement of Open Source software.

      Ummm, let's see, Alan Cox on the kernel, Chris Blizzard on Mozilla, Havoc on Gnome, bero does KDE packages

      Those are the ones on the top of my head. I probably forgot a few, but GNOME, gcc, and certainly Mozilla on Linux wouldn't be as far as they are today without the Red Hat guys.
    • Okay, I can understand those reasons, but these?
      • Red Hat has been a strong contributor to creation and enhancement of Open Source software

        cd /usr/src/linux
        grep -ih redhat MAINTAINERS CREDITS \
        | perl -pe 's/^.:\s*//' | sort -u


      • Collaborative process is at the heart of Open Source software development

        True. If you look around you will occasionally find a single-person project, but you would for sure also find pledges for help on the projects home-page :-)

      • The collaborative Open Source process allows widely distributed contributors to participate

        cd /usr/src/linux-2.4
        grep -ih '@' MAINTAINERS CREDITS \
        | perl -p -e 's/^.*\.//; s/\W.*/\n/' | sort -u


      • ArsDigita has strong Open Source roots

        True. The original pre-java version of ACS was fully open sourced. Their new java version is not, though.

  • Will this press release bore the hell out of all? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 13, 2002 @04:52PM (#3159440)
    * 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.

    • Re:I like RedHat but... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by StudMuffin ( 167171 ) on Wednesday March 13, 2002 @05:22PM (#3159587)
      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)
      • Red Hat seems to be doing this a lot, they were very smart, they sold the secondary offering of stock when their stock was way overvalued, pocketed several hundred million dollars, and now they are buying up the assets and employees of a lot of bankrupt open source companies for pennies on the dollar.

        Makes me glad to own Red Hat stock, even though I did lose a lot riding it from $30 to $9, I made it back riding it from $4 to $7, and still holding those shares right now. It would take a major turn of events to make me sell their stock now.

        Red Hat is THE American Linux company, now that LNUX is misnamed. I always knew they would come through in the end.

        --This post powered by Red Hat (tm) Linux. :)
      • RedHat's 'purchase' of Ars Digita allows Greylock to bury the aD losses in the RH books

        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 thought they hated Tcl! God knows
    they've fired or alienated into quitting
    enough of their Tcl people.

    • Re:But... (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Who are you talking about?

      BTW, the ArsDigita stuff is not TCL any more. They're using Java or something (last I heard).

      Personally I think both TCL and Java suck... If the functional language people would get off their collective butts and write a real compiler, those would be the languages of choice. By real compiler I mean something that compiles directly from source to assembly language without using a middle layer of C. This would allow compiled functional programs to run at what we consider normal speed ("normal" being C).
      • Have you worked with ocaml?

        www.ocaml.org.

        It's a great language, and transparently compiles to assembly on both windows and linux. Fast, modular, with all the functional fun that the kids want these days.
      • If the functional language people would get off their collective butts and write a real compiler, those would be the languages of choice. By real compiler I mean something that compiles directly from source to assembly language without using a middle layer of C.

        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...

  • Wouldn't that be nice? Then we wouldn't have to worry about SF doing a /. and begin some weird subscription scheme. And the service would remain Free. Gnulix - not only a short bread
  • It's always nice to see that open source companies are devoted enough to the movement to try to keep (what they see as) valuable parts of it from failing. Still, I hope we don't end up seeing them be so supportive that they drive themselves into the ground in the process...

  • Looks to me... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by banky ( 9941 ) <gregg@neuroba[ ]ng.com ['shi' in gap]> on Wednesday March 13, 2002 @05:23PM (#3159598) Homepage Journal
    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.
    • As an ex-ad it's more like this:
      • Greylock owns Red Hat
      • Greylock owns Arsdigita
      • Arsdigta is a failure
      • Use Red Hat money to "buy" Arsdigita
      • Write off Arsdigita as a loss ($$$) (because that's basically what it is)
      If Red Hat hat really wanted some java programmer they would've gone out there and hired some (theyre' a dime a dozen in case you haven't looked at the current economy). And it doesn't really make sense that they basically just fired everyone in aD except those who are needed to clean the rest of the $hit up.
      • The problem with "Wanted: Java Programmers" is that you have to have a product and a vision. By buying up AD, they already HAVE a product and vision, and can strike out from there (or cancel it if they don't like it). They have a client list, a product, people with knowledge of the product, everything. That puts them in a much better state than an ad in the local paper.
      • The press release is just corporate bullshit.

        'ACSJ provides enterprise customers with a scalable, reliable platform for ACS deployments' - LOL.

        To my knowledge there has never been any site succesfully built using ACS Java - sorry, ACSJ - and I doubt there ever will be. I don't know why RedHat bought the company - what were they thinking of? Did Greylock tell them to?

    • Re:Looks to me... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by bonius_rex ( 170357 )
      This "showdown" is a Big_Fucking_Deal(TM).

      Sun's refusal to open Java to a standards body is making it really hard for me (a card-carrying Open-Source-Looney) to figure out what is better long term. I'm all for open standards, and (on the surface, at least) it looks like .NET is more open than J2EE. (Microsoft, has at least submitted some of .NET to ECMA)

      Is this a correct analysis? Something the back of my mind tells me I've just been tricked...

      I have always been of the mind that the trio of Sun/Netscape/Oracle was the One_True_Religion, but now I'm not so sure.

      • That is probably a correct analysis. That is/was/will be the MS battle plan, Be open, give stuff away, etc... However, I pity you when version 4 comes out which, in order for MS to innovate had to make certain "changes" that "unfortunately" will cause some compatibility problems with competitors products not integrated into Windows.

        t.

  • Background (Score:3, Informative)

    by Futurepower(tm) ( 228467 ) <M_Jennings @ not ... futurepower.org> on Wednesday March 13, 2002 @05:26PM (#3159608) Homepage

    See this for background about ArsDigita:

    ArsDigita: From Start-Up to Bust-Up by Philip Greenspun [waxy.org]
  • 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
    • CMS is a proactive collaboration toolkit based on fundamental shifts in paradigm in the sector of flattening orginizations. This will allow for B2B and B2C relationships in cyberspace, thus increasing flow of information and ideas, in an interactive way.

      BINGO!

    • Re:Let's define what a CMS is... (Score:5, Informative)

      by denshi ( 173594 ) <toddg@math.utexas.edu> on Wednesday March 13, 2002 @07:42PM (#3160346) Homepage Journal
      The other poster's cynical point are correct, but not technically useful. I'll handle that.

      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 [openacs.org] 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.

      • Eek! I just built that OpenACS 4.5 beta1 tarball and it has a stupid error in it, and it's already mentioned on slashdot???. Oh no ... it's bad enough having the flu without having one of the symptoms (temporary incompetence) exposed to the world!

  • No subscription for me! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 13, 2002 @05:55PM (#3159804)
    "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! [slashdot.org] 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.

  • Well, this ought to please cheapbytes! (Score:5, Funny)

    by abe ferlman ( 205607 ) <bgtrio.yahoo@com> on Wednesday March 13, 2002 @06:03PM (#3159853) Homepage Journal
    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".

    • You despair about Cheapbytes' notice stating that they have to call Red Hat Linux "XXX XXX Linux" because of the trademark. Don't despair, they could be even more serious about trademark law. I personnally think they should call it "XXX XXX XXXXX". Maybe it's just me, but a "XXXXX distribution" sounds a lot more interesting than yet another Linux distro. The GUI on that has to be nice.

  • Then/than? *argh* (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "a longer life THAN..." not "a longer life THEN..."

    Is it TOO much to ask supposed "editors" to actually make sure that what they write (and expect us to PAY for) is at least vaguely grammatically correct?

    *sheesh*

  • Moving to compete with VA? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by nzkoz ( 139612 ) on Wednesday March 13, 2002 @06:35PM (#3160023) Homepage

    Looking at the press release, I noticed the following bullets:

    • Red Hat has been a strong contributor to creation and enhancement of Open Source software
    • Collaborative process is at the heart of Open Source software development
    • The collaborative Open Source process allows widely distributed contributors to participate

    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.

  • What I want to know is whether they're gonna make an effort to get some of the original team on board, Greenspun, Eve Andersson, etc. Assuming, of course, that they'd want to come back. But RedHat's got to have someone clueful to manage the ACS project if they ever want anything out of it besides a tax writeoff.
  • 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!

    • Re:But will ACS/Java be truly open? (Score:5, Informative)

      by dhogaza ( 64507 ) on Thursday March 14, 2002 @12:15AM (#3161199) Homepage
      Learn Tcl and join the OpenACS [slashdot.org] effort.

      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.

      • What's the relationship between openacs and java. Didn't ACS 4 introduce some java into the mix? Is ACSJ the only option for people who want something like ACS but with java integration?
        • Java is not needed or used in OpenACS 4.5beta1.

          There is discussion and experimentation with ways to add Java to the mix for those who need it. See the current thread about related AOLserver modules ns_java / ns_javablend [openacs.org] and their current status, on the OpenACS.Org [openacs.org] site.

          It's not especially relevant to the Java question, but I'm the person who tries to create Red Hat RPMs for OpenACS.

          • 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.

  • Nomenclature (Score:3, Funny)

    by flacco ( 324089 ) on Wednesday March 13, 2002 @10:21PM (#3160802)
    I've always thought that "ArsDigita" would be a great name for a proctologist's practice.
  • I bought 100 shares of RHAT at $5/share (couple of months ago), basically to put my money where my mouth was. It was a token of my support and I could not care less whether I lose it all or make a million (although I DO have a preference).

    I expected/hoped that RedHat would make decisions that struck a balance between open source and capitalistic risk taking. I think I'll pick up another 100 shares. Nice job.
  • What is the nature of the deal between Red Hat and ArsDigita?
    We bought them.

    How does the Red Hat/ArsDigita deal complement Red Hat's business?
    They make us bigger.

    How will Red Hat change the ArsDigita business?
    We'll swallow them.

    Will Red Hat continue to develop ACS for the Java Platform (ACSJ)?
    Yes.

    When will the 5.0 version of ACSJ be released?
    Whenever we damn well feel like it.

    Will ACSJ remain Open Source?
    Yes.

    Will Red Hat change the license for ACSJ from ADPL to GPL?
    Yes. Well, probably.

    Will ACS continue to be called "ACS"?
    Yes. Well, maybe.

    What will happen to www.arsdigita.com?
    We'll swallow it.

    Will Red Hat continue to operate ArsDigita's public discussion forums (web/db, "ACS Core & CMS", etc.)?
    Yes.

  • Wow... this press release reads like an executive Power Point presentation. Ten to one it was. :)

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