ArsDigita

» see arsdigita.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

ArsDigita started in 1997 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, around an idea that was briefly very profitable. Large organizations wanted database-backed websites where visitors could register and talk to each other, and almost nobody knew how to build one. Philip Greenspun and six co-founders sold that work as consulting and gave away the software underneath it. The ArsDigita Community System ran on AOLserver with Oracle behind it, written in Tcl, and it shipped forums and user accounts as working code rather than as a specification you still had to implement.

The business worked without anyone having to be clever about it. Revenue reached roughly twenty million dollars a year before the company took a cent of outside money, and headcount peaked near 180. Greenspun wrote a book about how to do all of this, put it on the free web, and ran a photography site on the same software, which meant a generation of developers learned the architecture from the man who was also selling it. For a couple of years ArsDigita was the thing you pointed at when somebody asked whether open source could pay salaries.

What reached me in Turkey was not the company. It was the writing. Greenspun's guide to web publishing sat free on the web while I was on a 33.6k modem downloading anything technical that would finish before the line dropped, and photo.net was one of those sites everyone linked to without knowing who ran it. A consulting firm charging American universities half a million dollars an installation was never going to be visible from here. I learned there had been a company at all years after there wasn't one.

~ the dossier ~

~ the thirty-eight million ~

In 2000 ArsDigita raised $38 million from Greylock and General Atlantic, and within months the founders had been moved out of the management structure. Greenspun's account, written at length and passed around the web for years afterward, is that the investors installed professional managers who did not understand what the company sold. The founders used their stock to vote themselves back onto the board. The investors sued them in the Delaware Chancery Court. The case settled, Greenspun walked away with $7.6 million, and by the time the lawyers were finished the customers who had been buying half-million-dollar implementations were themselves going out of business.

There was a side project that deserves its own line. ArsDigita University ran a free one-year computer science program in Cambridge, taught at graduate level to students who already had degrees in something else, funded entirely by the company. It lost its funding and closed its doors at the end of the academic year in July 2001, about seven months before the company did. The lectures are still online.

~ what happened to the code ~

On 8 February 2002 the news went around that ArsDigita had been closed and its assets sold to Red Hat. The transaction is dated 11 February. Red Hat took the Java version of the toolkit and renamed it Red Hat CCM, official support for the Tcl version stopped, and the inventory list that circulated afterward included a pinball machine and several pieces of artwork.

The toolkit itself did not die, because it had been given away and somebody else already had it. A community fork called OpenACS added PostgreSQL, which removed the Oracle license from the stack entirely, and it is still maintained. The university learning system built on top of it, .LRN, ran for years in European higher education. The company spent $38 million discovering that the valuable part was the part it had been handing out for free.

~ the address afterward ~

arsdigita.com did not go dark on the day the company did. The Internet Archive has the full corporate site still serving on 31 March 2002, seven weeks after the closure, with the nav bar and the pitch intact: flexible, fast, fixed-cost implementations in 60 to 120 days. Nobody came back to take it down.

By 21 September 2002 the same address answered with the Red Hat home page. Whitepapers about point-of-sale systems at Papa John's, a webcast about Red Hat and HP, a newsletter signup. The domain had become a redirect into somebody else's marketing department, which is the ordinary fate of a dead brand, and here it happened fast enough that the old site and the new one are seven months apart in the archive.

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