Forum OpenACS Q&A: ArsDigita Gives Open Source A Try

Sure the Interactive Week (referenced) and Venturewire coverage were depressing at best, but these were obviously the rehashing of the original press release by uncaring, brain dead, copy writing interns who couldn't care less about yet another piddling press release from yet another small web... err, Enterprise Software Development... consultancy. The eWeek coverage obviously had slightly more fact checking behind it. Of course, the fact that the press release itself was one of the standard, badly written pieces of baby-talk that every evil (or wannabe-evil) corporation dishes out by the ream didn't help. There was no indication in that release that Interactive Week (or Venturewire) could have used to give different information.

Of course, this dreary piece of marketing pablum from some anonymous flack inside the bowels of ArsDigita is, in itself, depressing. It is one more symptom of the changes that seem to have shaken that company in the last year. The fact that aD can release something without a name attatched to it is horribly depressing and gives even the least attentive outsider a picture of a new corporate culture. However, none of this affects the software on which OpenACS is currently focusing, nor is it likely to have any short term effects on that software. Just because you can't click on a link from the aD main page for fear of hitting something idiotic and depressing does not mean that either the toolkit or the company have gone to hell just yet.

A far more depressing sign of increasing corporate evil on the part of ArsDigita is this here Help Wanted ad. Whatever happened to using software that works, guys? Or is that just my knee-jerk prejudice against overpriced and badly designed software talking again?

I don't mind if aD gets attention. Good for them. Too bad it had to be this way. Of course, this is nothing new: aD's press release list is long, and gets increasingly boring as you get further into 2000. They refer to themselves as the leaders of this or that, or "a leading provider" of that and the other thing. It is (a) false and (b) off-putting to people who know better. As soon as someone uses a word like that I tune them out.

Others have said it better than I can here, but a company without a voice just isn't an interesting company.

These ideas are explained and developed further in the Cluetrain Mainfesto. Avoid the content-free web site (cluetrain.com), and read the book.

Those are good questions.  Rest assured, aD does still build its own tools with ACS and use them extensively.  WimpyPoint, Intranet, ACS Repository, Room Reservations, etc.  However, to *only* use internal tools would be a classic example of 'Not Invented Here' syndrome.  Not being involved with the Exchange Server discussions, I can't comment about that particular case, but yes, we do have faith in ACS.