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Sophos Acquires ActiveState

Posted by timothy on from the sophosticated-dealings dept.

Jacco de Leeuw writes "I was checking the website of anti-virus vendor Sophos when I noticed a press release: " Sophos Acquires Anti-Spam Specialist ActiveState for $23 million in cash". I didn't even know ActiveState was into anti-spam! What will this mean for their ActivePerl or ActivePython products?"

7 of 30 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What will this mean... by MonTemplar · · Score: 4, Informative
    Actually, from reading the article (yeah, I know... nobody on /. does that...) :
    ActiveState's product lines for open source programmers will continue to be developed and sold under the ActiveState brand. As a division of Sophos, the existing ActiveState team is committed to continuing its support of the open source language community.

    As to why Sophos have bought ActiveState, this press release would appear to indicate the reason - the PureMessage anti-spam system.

    MT.
    --
    -MT.
  2. What will it mean for open source? ... RTFA? by thing12 · · Score: 3, Informative
    Maybe the story submitter should have read the article he submitted...

    ActiveState's product lines for open source programmers will continue to be developed and sold under the ActiveState brand. As a division of Sophos, the existing ActiveState team is committed to continuing its support of the open source language community.

  3. Windows language distributions by phch · · Score: 3, Informative

    The Python project provides convenient installers for Windows, so I've never relied on ActivePython. Besides, they're still a version behind anyway. But ActiveTcl and ActivePerl still seem to be the most convenient binary distributions on Win32. Hope they're still maintained.

    1. Re:Windows language distributions by burnitall · · Score: 2, Informative

      "Hope they're still maintained."

      yes they are! for linux and solaris as well =)

  4. All is good ... by hobbs · · Score: 5, Informative

    As an ActiveState employee, I can say that this is all good, even for the tools and open source languages side of our business. While Sophos' anti-virus products merge well with ActiveState's successful PureMessage anti-spam software, Sophos is fully aware of the value ActiveState has received from the tools and languages side as well.

    All ActiveState employees will be sticking around, doing what they were doing before. We will continue to make the Active(Perl|Python|Tcl) language distributions and continue development on Komodo, TDK, PDK, etc.

    There is more in the open letter here:
    http://www.activestate.com/corporate/letter/

  5. Re:What will this mean... by harikiri · · Score: 2, Informative

    Don't forget ActiveTcl! ;-)

    --
    Man watching 6 MSCE's around a sun box, looks alot like the opening scene's of 2001:space odyssey...
  6. From the horses mouth .. by RubberDuckie · · Score: 2, Informative

    I just received a call from someone at ActiveState (we use their Spam filter). She told me that they would continue to support all the ActiveState products, including the open source languages. She also said there would be no staff reductions. Let's hope the transition is painless (for the employees and the rest of us).