Forum OpenACS Q&A: Bad News

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Posted by Cheng-Yi Hsu on
http://kriston.net/vitals/

I'm really worry about the future of aolserver.

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2: Re: Bad News (response to 1)
Posted by Talli Somekh on
While it's a bummer that Kriston lost his job and I'm sorry for him, this doesn't really mean anything for AOLserver. If anythign, the future of our dear server is brighter than ever.

A week or two ago Nathan Folkman made an announcement in the AOLserver chat that AOL was seeking to cut 100M from their budget and that restructuring would take place within the AOLserver and Netscape Server departments.

Considering that all of AOL.com and Netscape.com now are running on AOLserver, I imaigne they might be killing the Netscape product before they kill AOLserver, particularly since Don posted that they will be moving AOL.com to AOLserver 4.0 soon.

Anyway, the real time to get worried is when Jim Davidson loses is out. There's no indication of that.

talli

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3: Re: Bad News (response to 1)
Posted by Roberto Mello on
Indeed. It's sad about Kriston. But AOLserver development will go on. The downturn is probably why Jim Davidson started looking after implement an out-of-aol team.

-Roberto

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4: Re: Bad News (response to 1)
Posted by Malte Sussdorff on
Taking in account this thread https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=17737 and the fact that there had been flamewars going on because of Kriston's behaviour, I wonder why you think him going away would deal a serious blow to AOLserver. I completly agree with the posts above. There is no good reason for AOL to drop AOLserver support. And after all it is still an Open Source product with most of us still using 3.3+ad13 so I don't think we as an OACS community have to treat it as BAD news. Sad news maybe.
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5: Re: Bad News (response to 1)
Posted by Don Baccus on
I certainly won't miss Kriston.  He set the community back a year, at least ...
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6: Re: Bad News (response to 1)
Posted by Andrew Piskorski on
AFAIK, Kriston had already not been involved with AOLserver at all for many months. If you search the AOLserver list archives, you'll find that his last post of any sort was 2002-10-29, his last genuinely AOLserver related post was 2002-10-04, and if I remember correctly he'd been awfully quiet before then too.

Last I heard on the AOLserver chat was that as of a few weeks ago, AOL assigned 3 full time people to the AOLserver group - not including Jim Davidson (the guru who wrote 4.0), who is (I think) in charge of the Digital City group and contributes to AOLserver development on his own initiative (because AOLserver is critical to Digital City, etc.).

So we'll see how it all works out, but Talli is right - things look better for AOLserver lately, not worse.

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7: Re: Bad News (response to 1)
Posted by Lamar Owen on
Jim Davidson was and is the guru behind the whole thing, since version 1 NaviServer.

Join the AOLserver chats on thursdays at 2PM EST (on AIM, chat 'aolserver').  If you have Linux, GAIM works well (I use it).

AOLserver development is in the best shape it's been in years with the current AOLserver Core Team (including 4 community members and 3 AOL employees) doing a fine job.  The four community members are regulars here as well, particularly Tom Jackson.