I am going to toss in the philosphy thing again as I did in the .NET thread. One of the concepts that appealed to me most about ArsDigita was the philosophy with which the GPL licence was compatible (in my opinion). I agree with Richard Stallman that people tend to grab "Open Source" many times without the philosphy of "free software" (which does not mean free in price for those that are unfamiliar with the FreeSoft Foundation). Personally I think that this is really important to us as programmers and as companies. I have been there with proprietary business models and they dont work very well to be honest. Microsoft would be losing billions each year if it weren't for its very questionable accounting of employee stock options. Everytime we code, we bring in things we learned from someone elses code so we should give that back as a principle. Once you stray from those principles you get into the MBA "profit is the goal" greed mentality which has caused many good companies to dive into the dustbin.
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I believe that OpenACS should stick with the idea of being a free software product released undr the full GPL license which improves through constant contributions by a active developer community and tries to teach and diseminate what they know. Sure big corporations will probably still shell out megabucks for Broadvision or Vignette (no ArsDigita isnt even on their radar screens), but more organizations will choose a more cost effective robust solution. I think ArsDigita is trying to take on the big boys now, and I suspect that they will not be successful. Remember that Vignette has a TON of Fortune 500 customers , $500Mil in the bank and a established Java/J2EE product as well as TCL and ASP support.
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Lastly I agree with Ben. It is clear that ADPL is incompatible with OpenACS and we should stay well clear of it.
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As far as the idiot in those last posts.. sounds like you should go find work in Redmond.
