Someone referred to a piece of this on web/db but didn't mention that
it had some business news too, and not just a comment about open vs.
closed source:
From this story (this is
the only Ars Digita stuff in it):
Keshian on call
Greylock venture partner Dan Keshian is developing a reputation
as the firm's Mr. Fix-It. Earlier this year, Greylock
dispatched him to
serve as interim CEO at Digital Media on Demand, an
Allston
start-up that had developed software to make online
music distribution
more secure.
After overseeing some staff cutbacks and a strategy
adjustment (the
software is now geared to record labels and video
production
companies that want to securely share
works-in-progress among
different offices), Keshian was off to his next
appointment, and Mark
Overington, who had worked with Keshian at AVID
Technology,
was installed as CEO at Digital Media.
Keshian is now CEO at Cambridge's ArsDigita, the
software
company that earlier this year was in the throes of a
control struggle
between founder Philip Greenspun and its two main
investors,
Greylock and General Atlantic. (A lawsuit ended with
a settlement in
June, from which Greenspun seems to have profited
nicely. He's now
touring the country in a new Winnebago. Really.)
Keshian says that a series of layoffs at ArsDigita
had been planned
before his arrival, that former ArsDigita CEO Allen
Shaheen will stay
on as president of worldwide solutions, and that the
company won't
need to raise additional funding to get to
profitability, following a $38
million round last year.
''My goal here is to help this group get to market
with this technology,''
Keshian says.
Instead of pushing an open-source software suite for
Web site
management, community, and e-commerce, ArsDigita will
focus on
what it calls ''enterprise collaboration management''
- software that will
help large groups use the Web to work together more
efficiently.
Shaheen says that while the ArsDigita products that
have already
been released will remain freely available as open
source, ''the future
is currently open for discussion.''
