ArsDigita
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
ArsDigita built web applications and an open-source community-system toolkit for online businesses.
02 / ArsDigita FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
ArsDigita was profitable as a founder-run company, but after taking $35 million in venture capital in March 2000 it expanded to 240 employees and five offices while new management deprecated the feature-complete ACS 3.4 product before the Java rewrite (ACS 4.x) was finished — a classic way to kill a software company. Cash reserves bottomed out after rounds of layoffs, and in February 2002 the company was sold to Red Hat for pennies, with almost everyone remaining laid off.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Company founded
ArsDigita is founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts by Philip Greenspun, Tracy Adams, Ben Adida, Eve Andersson, Olin Shivers, Aurelius Prochazka and Jin Choi, producing the open-source ArsDigita Community System (ACS) toolkit for database-backed community websites.
- Venture funding and expansion
In March 2000, General Atlantic Partners and Greylock invest $35 million; the company grows to 240 employees and five offices in the US and Europe, with $25 million in revenue for 2000.
- Acquisition by Red Hat
In February 2002, after cash reserves bottomed out and repeated layoffs, Red Hat acquires ArsDigita and all its assets; almost everyone remaining is laid off. The Java version becomes Red Hat CCM while the Tcl version continues as the community-maintained OpenACS.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
In February 2002, Red Hat snaps up the remnants of ArsDigita, the open-source content management software vendor, in a deal reported on February 12.
- 02
Almost everyone remaining at the company is laid off, including the developers.
- 03
The product line is absorbed: the Java version is renamed Red Hat CCM and official support for the Tcl version ceases, though it lives on through the OpenACS community.