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Slashdot.org Acquired by Andover.net

Surprises

from the wow dept

Tue, Jun 29th 1999 12:20pm — Mike Masnick
I knew that something was going to happen with Slashdot sooner or later. They must have been receiving a ton of attention, but the decision to sell out to Andover.net is a surprise. You might not be able to get to that link. It seems to be a bit overloaded right now. I am happy for them, though. I understand their reasoning. Obviously, I've been a big fan of Slashdot for a long time, and we used their code to develop this site. Congratulations... I can't wait to see what they do with it now. Update: News.com has posted an article about the acquisition. Update 2: A great interview with Rob about the sale is appearing at Wired News.
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6 Comments

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  • identicon
    Jon Acheson, 29 Jun 1999 @ 4:49pm

    Seems like a win-win situation.

    This will let Rob Malda unload a lot of the accounting and advertising workload onto the Andover staff, which gives him more time to do what he does best.

    Andover gets their share of the ad money, plus a high-profile website to give them an increased profile.

    Good news all around...

    [ link to this | view in chronology ]

    • icon
      Mike (profile), 29 Jun 1999 @ 4:56pm

      Re: Seems like a win-win situation.

      I definitely agree. I think it's a great situation for Rob. He gets to focus on the site, and gets the monetary backing to do so. Andover gets a great site to add to their stable, and the ability to make some money off of it as well. The surprise was that I really didn't know much about Andover.

      The only issue I wonder about is if they'll productize the slash code...

      [ link to this | view in chronology ]

      • identicon
        George Leidolf, 29 Jun 1999 @ 9:36pm

        Re: Seems like a win-win situation.

        Well, since Rob released the Slash code under the GPL, anything that Andover does to it must also be released under the GPL. Even if they package and sell it. That's why RedHat and other Linux distributions have free downloads as well as their commercially packaged CDs.

        [ link to this | view in chronology ]

        • icon
          Mike (profile), 30 Jun 1999 @ 1:17am

          Re: Seems like a win-win situation.

          Yeah, I have no problem with the GPL (actually, the reverse is true - I think the GPL is great). That doesn't mean it can't be productized, just like RedHat and the others. In fact, I think Slash has great potential to be productized. It is available free, and anyone can try to put it together, but many people will want support or consulting for helping to put it together. Or hell, let Andover build other sites with it and have people pay them...

          For example, say I didn't want to mess with the Slash code (or, as was the case, let Dennis mess with the Slash code), I could just pay some nominal fee to Andover's consultants to create the slash-based site of my choice... Or something like that... I think there would be plenty of companies who might find that, or a packaged version of Slash valuable with documentation they could buy.

          [ link to this | view in chronology ]

          • identicon
            Jon Acheson, 30 Jun 1999 @ 10:11am

            Productizing the Slash code

            I can't see why they wouldn't do it, if there was a demand.

            Although, if I was a company planning to run a site as a business concern, I'd probably want to hire someone who could do this rather than outsourcing the work. It seems to me the volume of the work and the need for tweaking would require full-time supervision.

            Jon

            [ link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    George Leidolf, 29 Jun 1999 @ 9:43pm

    Another link

    Here's another link form the New York Times (probably some free registration required). The usual Slashdot-reader username/password of cypherpunks/cypherpunks works.

    http://www.nytimes.com/techweb/TW_Andover_Net_Buys_Slashdot.html

    - George

    [ link to this | view in chronology ]


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