|
|
Epitaph for arsDigita
This was originally posted at http://philip.greenspun.com
in May, 2001, in a discussion about the lawsuit brought by
Philip Greenspun against ArsDigita's venture capitalists. As part of the settlement, the discussion was taken off
the web. My speculation in the last paragraph turned out to be
wrong. Philip was satisfied with a settlement that allowed him to achieve
his lifetime financial goal. The VC installed management
sold the remains of the company to RedHat in 2002.
The saga suggests three well-known dramas: aD: Jesus Christ and the rise of Christianity; arsDigita: Marx and the fleecing of Russia; and ArsDigita: Steve Jobs' rebirth at Apple: The Faith of aDaD, which used to be typed "arsDigita" before the Harvard grads took over, owes its existence to the zeitgeist of the MIT AI Lab where Philip, after a delay for previous entrepreneurial diversions and photography, earned a PhD for his work on database backed web sites. Philip stated a fully free and open source solution, as an alternative to the dominant closed source approaches (Allaire's Cold Fusion and Microsoft's ASP. The work was continued byOpenForce and OpenACS). Philip complemented this with a recruitment strategy that included free seminars and bootcamps. Philip's offering was well received by the many programmers who seek to balance corporate hegemony but the main apostle of the faith, who was arguably also the most productive programmer in his time, is the author of the largest and most seminal contribution to the Linux distribution, Richard Stallman. I remember well one encounter with him at a west-coast trade show, sometime after carpal tunnel syndrome, if not the MacArthur genius award, had diverted him from coding. Alone in a booth with bare feet and long, stringy hair, Richard was styled in the manner of Christ headed for the cross. With his important teachings already distributed (GPL, copyleft) but flawed by rants, it will be difficult for acolytes to reconstruct a more perfect image as the apostles did for Jesus. Yet, as the "ne plus ultra" evangelist for the cause of free and open software, he deserves greater recognition and is my leading candidate for messiah of the next millenimum's apocrypha. arsDigita: Revolution UsurpedThis view needs little further support in light of the comments already posted but a historical analogy can help to gain some perspective and humor for those, like myself, who are indebted to Philip and feel his pain most acutely. In this case, Stallman, like Karl Marx, is the originator of a manifesto made righteous by unrestrained capitalism and Philip, like Trotsky, inspired compatriots with the resulting fervor. But the doctrines were neither pure nor theoretically correct and one instance struck me during the summer of '99 when the company was still operating out of a home in Cambridgeport and I was attending bootcamp. Philip's official line was that engineers would be paid according to what they produced minus a small contribution towards company overhead. Maybe that's what his right brain thought, but after an apparent inter-hemispheric switch, he related across the kitchen table that one of his programmers in Eastern Europe was happy to receive much less. Philip smiled about putting the difference into the company that mostly Jin and he own, then changed the subject. One could say that such imperfections have accumulated and magnified under VC control. It would not be unfair to liken ArsDigita's president Shaheen to Lenin, who took over Trotsky's revolution and then agreed to have him banished. ArsDigita: Another Fruit like Apple?CEO Shaheen is acutely aware that he is incapable of following in Philip's footsteps and evangelizing the developer community that was so crucial to arsDigita's strategy. But with support from the other well-paid managers and their non-believer backers, the partners of Greylock and General Atlantic, Allen apparently committed to confirming the banishment by bringing suit. It's all but certain that the "phone book" stack of closing documents will provide a legal basis for the judge to rule in favor of the managing confidence men, mostly from Harvard, over the essential competent, most of whom are from MIT and CalTech.The new executive strategy, to convert the company from consulting to a $100+ million company by creating a defensible (and closed) asset, will almost certainly fail. With a disillusioned and dissipated community, ArsDigita will have no significant comparative advantages in any space. Pretending to be batting for the bleachers is no excuse when everybody can see that you're holding a hollow plastic bat. Thus the aftermath of the suit could be like Jobs' return to Apple. (Jobs richly deserved his fate: in his determination to control the entire platform and extract, as Jean-Louis Gasee was fond of saying, a "premium price for a premium product", Jobs' greed far outpaced Gates' vision, circa 1985.) Once ArsDigita is reduced to a mere glimmer of arsDigita's promise and an evil ghost of aD's hope, its investor-controlled board may deign to meet with a chastened Philip at its head. As far as I can see, that condition has already been met but the resident "mice" reputed to be residing in the building may require that his cardkey be equipped with an ego sensor that, given appropriately calm biometrics, would let him pass through a front door built for more mortal souls. Copyleft 2001, Bruce A. McHenry |
