Spinoff

I wasn't able to get into the other forum I set up last night so I spent the evening looking for other software. I found this set up and I really like it because it has a spell check, a preview feature and it even tells you what time someone posted! It doesn't allow anyone to check IP's (including me) as far as I can tell. I think it will work out real well if we get cut off here.

This thread is continued from here. I started a new one so noone will miss the new board.

I realize this is a pain in the butt, but will you all post "test" or whatever over there to see if it works for everyone? Thanks.

-- (Nets@cape 6.0), April 03, 2001

Answers

Worked for me.

-- FutureShock (gray@matter.think), April 03, 2001.

Thanks FS.

Come on Unk, it's your turn. Come on, you can do it. :-D We certainly don't want to lose you either.

-- (Nets@cape 6.0), April 03, 2001.

I just want to make sure everyone sees this:

ArsDigita U. Cuts On Campus Admissions

"ArsDigita University, which has been previously featured here, has lost its funding for the 2001-2002 year, and so won't be accepting applications. While it is all perfectly reasonable to expect that the good and great causes rising out of the Internet Boom will suffer the same fate as the many bad causes in the Internet Bust, I find it rather sad nonetheless." Note that the course materials will remain online, though -- so while it's still a sad turn that they can't accept applicants for the on-campus program for now, there is a silver lining."

"ArsDigita has undertaken a restructuring of the company that has resulted in the termination of 29 employees (less than 15% of the overall workforce) and the closure of our offices in Atlanta, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. The terminations, which took place across the board and affected all departments of the company, were based upon a combination of employee performance and the our goal of achieving profitability in the next 4 quarters. Regarding Relations with the Developer Community Going Forward As many of you know, Friday was Adam Farkas's last day at ArsDigita. His departure is not intended to suggest a reduced commitment to the development community, although I can understand how you might jump to that conclusion. The best thing we can do for the community is to continue to invest in the product. And the restructuring that occurred on Friday was a step that was taken to ensure that we can continue to do so. Our plan going forward is as follows:

David Tropiano (dtropian@arsdigita.com) will be monitoring the bulletin boards and making sure that messages are answered in a timely fashion. David will route messages as appropriate to either product management or development. Joe Lichtenberg's group of product managers will handle questions about product direction and Jeff Teeters in development will deal with the technical questions. I will personally spend more time interacting with the community. I began by meeting with Peter Vessenes of Ybos a couple weeks ago and I will do my best to keep informed of and involved in the discussions on the bboards. I'll be happy to arrange meetings/phone conferences with any others in the development community who are interested in sharing their point of view or who wish to hear first hand our commitment and plans going forward.

-- Dave Menninger, April 1, 2001

Ah, so the SVP of Marketing, sensing bad publicity, comes from up high to weigh in with his words of wisdom ... So what you're saying is:

* That Dr. Farkas did a bad job instilling confidence in the community; * That three people can do a much better job than one person who did an already great job; * That, finally, after working at aD for six months you've graced us with a note on the bboards saying absolutely nothing, *but* we ought to have even more confidence in this company of nearly constantly decreasing integrity?

OK, I'm sold.

PS. Are you keeping the koi pond? Are the fish good Java hackers? How about the piano?

-- jim Zamboob, April 1, 2001

Dave, Who will be handling the third party integrators/ partnerships? We have yet to hear from Adam for emails we sent in February. Finally we saw on this board that he left. Also it would be very nice of you if you can clarify the partnership criterion. Our developers spent nights redoing the Problem sets for 4.x as per Adam's suggestion which they have already done a year before and we are still waiting without any feedback about it.

-- Unmesh Laddha, April 1, 2001

Fish For me anyway, the fish, piano, beach house, and like amenities represent the best of the old aD, not the worst of the new. Read Philip's bit on Professionalism. Elitism isn't a bad thing if you want to work with the elite. It's ArsDigita, not JoeSixpackWebDev. There's room in the universe for both.

Anyway, I thank Ben Adida and Unmesh Ladha for keeping the faith and avoiding gratuitous flames at a difficult time.

(By the way, I'd love to hire an ex-arsdigitan... after the crash, our pay scales are less laughable than they used to be, and I have an open web/db posting. We're building on acs 3.4.10 now, but will be switching to something, maybe ACS5, maybe something else entirely this summer.)

-- Rich Graves, April 2, 2001

Rich, you've got something there. There should be some nice landing places for ex-arsDigitans. If they can stay in the community, all the better.

-- Terry Kearns, April 2, 2001

First off let me state that I am very grateful for what I have gleaned from AD and do sincerely wish them success. That said let me post some quotes from various parts of AD's website with some comments:

"The company received $38m in March 2000 ...ArsDigita generated $26m in revenue for FY2000. "

"Financial viability: We recently passed $20 million in annualized sales; we have doubled in size in the past six months. We have been profitable since our founding in 1997. "

"Finally, because we're open source we get contributions from developers worldwide. How good are those developers? Sometimes they're better than we are! Because our toolkit is the world's most powerful, the users tend to be pushing the state of the art in some way. Those users also have been generous with their time, advice, and source code."

"His departure is not intended to suggest a reduced commitment to thedevelopment community, although I can understand how you might jump to that conclusion."

Analysis of this statement does not preclude that a reduced commitment to the community does not exist or even intended, just not that it was suggested.

I understand that certain areas of growth and extension (offices) in certain parts of the country may not have worked out to what was expected; but I view Adams role directly related to AD committment to open source and the community that fortunately for AD has formed arount it. It does not appear that AD is really *losing* money yet so the restructuring of Adams position should either relate to his performance or a shifting of AD's committment to OS. Obviously it wasnt his performance from the communitys perspective.

The Past

"Our first principle is that we do not lie to customers."

"Beyond that, we don't worry about corporate culture. We have a certain set of customers. We have a certain set of people. We have acertain set of tools. Discussions or theories won't change any of those things. If any ArsDigita member wants to change ArsDigita, he or she need only add to the customers, add to the people, or add to the tools."

"We want the community to contribute at every level (we're investing to support lots more engagement and contribution -- Adam Farkas' job is evidence of this commitment)"

"We don't ask you to bet your business on ours. Our software is 100% open source. Our training materials are 100% free and open source. You can build a system with our toolkit with 100% open source components except for Oracle."

The Present

"ArsDigita has undertaken a restructuring of the company ..."

"We may build certain packages on top of ACS and offer them to customers under non-GPL license agreements in the future. Exactly what, when, and how is still being determined here."

" For ACS to win as a standard, it needs adoption by commercial organizations, and they need to see a strong commercially-oriented vendor at the core of the development effort."

The Future?

"Before coming to ArsDigita, Dave was a VP of Product Management with Oracle, ... Dave spent several years as a VP with IRI Software, before its acquisition by Oracle."

"Richard brings ArsDigita over 20 years of software development experience, most recently as a VP of engineering at Oracle, ... under his leadership, transformed a consulting toolkit company writing custom applications into a software product vendor that was acquired profitably by Oracle in 1997."

"If Oracle survives and every other software vendor in the world fails, your site can still be supported."

-- Carl Garland, April 2, 2001

What is it about VC? I remember Philip saying once at a bootcamp that one of the proposed tag-lines for ArsDigita was, "We don't need VC we have profits!" This was somewhat inspiring in a time when most companies were saying, "We don't need profits, we have VC!"

A lot has changed since then.

I myself would like a better understanding of what was gained and what was lost when aD went down the VC path. Word in the community at the time was that without being able to offer stock options aD was having trouble recruiting talented programmers. Now it seems because of VC they are losing talented programmers.

-- Erik Rogneby, April 2, 2001

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The future Sadly, I am predicting a steady movement away from the open-source approach and philosophy. My gut tells me this is an old school closed management team. They will begin by (not) releasing closed source modules. Next the sharing of information will become less and less evident. The other approach I would encourage is to embrace the open -source community and utilize them as an extension of the organization. Provide them with the tools they need, let them become the 'at the coal face' team that provides consulting and sales revenues. This is a radical shift from the community being ancillary to being a primary focal point.

Can it work? I am not sure but simply becoming a me too organization will not.

-- Malcolm Silberman, April 2, 2001

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Hello all, I wanted to post and introduce myself. My name is David Tropiano and one of my primary job functions at ArsDigita is to assist with the aD discussion forums. I know it is a difficult time to bring a new voice into the forum, as Adam has clearly brought both voice and direction, but I have been following these forums for some time now, and I hope to help them stay vital. Most importantly, I'll work to get questions answered.

My concern is three-fold; I will work as hard as I can to make sure that:

Your questions, comments, criticisms, and suggestions are answered in a timely and professional manner: if I don't know how to answer your question, I'll find somebody who does. The Forum continues to be an open and accessible outlet for all to discuss ArsDigita products and company direction. Ultimately, ACS products are continually improved both through internal and external efforts. The Forums are a great tool for maintaining the value and quality of the software with our name on it. I am further aware that respect and trust are not given, but earned. For people who are concerned or frustrated, you can post to the BBoard, email me directly, or both: dtropiano@arsdigita.com.

I look forward to creating and maintaining a strong relationship with the aD community.

Best Regards, David Tropiano

-- David Tropiano, April 2, 2001

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Dave, thank you for posting. I'm curious if you can tell us a little bit more about the three people who will be picking up various pieces of Adam's former role. Not being privy to aD's internal organization chart, the people those of us in the community know are those who have, in the past, joined these Q&A forums or who have written the code (largely one and the same group). Jeff Teeters name was the only name mentioned that even sounded slightly familliar to me. A quick advanced search for Joe Lichtenberg turns up three links, other than your post, all of which are restricted to outsiders. We also don't find much of anything about David Tropiano, or yourself (outside of your two posts yesterday and a very brief career biography).

Could perhaps these individuals take a moment and introduce themselves to the community so that we can get to know them a bit better?

(Just as I was ready to submit this post I got the email alert re: David Tropiano's post. Thanks David. I hope we see you here as often as we did Adam.)

-- Michael A. Cleverly, April 2, 2001

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Re: The Future I must say my gut feelings parallel Malcom's. Events over the past few months make it seem as though "open- source" might not simply be just another buzzword-compliant arrow in the aD marketing quiver, that is useful to differentiate aD from the other "Java Companies" who have several years head-start in the Java arena.

-- Michael A. Cleverly, April 2, 2001

-- (Nets@cape 6.0), April 03, 2001.

In the event that everyones backup forums fail, I have created a double-failsafe-backup-forum to backup the backup forums created in the event that the main forums fail. Link

-- Uncle Bob (unclb0b@aol.com), April 03, 2001.

Just in case the backup to the backup that backs up the backup forums is no longer available, I have created a backup to the backup for the backup to the backup that can back up the backup backing up the backup of the backup oh never mind...

-- (toilet@backed.up), April 03, 2001.

Chuckle. It is pretty ridiculious until you try to logon and can't get in for hours. I have a lot of information stored on this software and I enjoy reading this forum so I would have a serious problem if Phil decided to close this section of his life down. He doesn't make any money off us and he has other forums he can show prospective clients where people use their real names, don't cuss or post nude pics and porn. I have read posts on Lusenet where mods had their passwords cracked and called him in the middle of the night. He wasn't happy about the calls and I don't understand why he allows this section of his software to continue. He might not close it down, but I want to make sure my friends have a place to go.

-- (Nets@cape 6.0), April 03, 2001.