ArsDigita

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

ArsDigita was a web development company cofounded by Philip Greenspun, Tracy Adams, Ben Adida, Eve Andersson and Jin Choi and was started in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the mid-1990s. The company produced a popular toolkit (the ACS) for building database-backed community websites, and flourished at the peak of the Internet bubble. It was known for actively supporting an open-source version of its toolkit, although the community supporting that version split away from the company in 1999.

ArsDigita took $38 million in venture capital investment from Greylock and General Atlantic in 2000 to provide working capital for expansion of its product line. Greenspun claims that the venture capitalists staged an internal coup to drive the founders out of the management structure and installed incompetent professional managers with little idea of how to run a technical company, resulting in the collapse of the company[1] and a lawsuit between the founding shareholders and the venture capitalists over control of management. [2] The lawsuit was settled out of court on undisclosed terms.

In 2002, ArsDigita was acquired by Red Hat. [3]

The founders of the ArsDigita Corporation also set up a nonprofit organization, the ArsDigita Foundation, which sponsored a yearly programming contest for high school students and, in 2000, a free physical school teaching an intensive one-year course in undergraduate computer science.

ArsDigita is unrelated to ArsTechnica, despite the similarity in name.