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Sophos Acquires ActiveState
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?"
As to why Sophos have bought ActiveState, this press release would appear to indicate the reason - the PureMessage anti-spam system.
MT.
-MT.
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.
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.
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/
Anybody know if they're planning on porting Active State perl to linux? Work that I used to do in linux with awk, sed, and shell scripting is now done in windows 98 with ActiveState Perl. A lot of the perl features and syntax reminds me of unix shell scripting, so it probably wouldn't be too hard to port it to linux.
Sophos's anti-virus technology will be integrated with PureMessage, ActiveState's enterprise email protection software, to deliver industry-leading anti-virus and anti-spam protection in a single, consolidated solution - Sophos PureMessage. PureMessage currently supports AIX, HP-UX, FreeBSD, Linux and Solaris. For more information please see http://www.sophos.com/products/pm/
So the real news here is that the hole created by Microsoft's purchase of RAV is about to be filled. Since ActiveState's relationship with Microsoft is important for their tools this could impact that relationship.
"Even if you are on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there" - Will Rogers
It means they will be able to consolidate their debt and significantly lower their monthly payments, of course...
Don't forget ActiveTcl! ;-)
Man watching 6 MSCE's around a sun box, looks alot like the opening scene's of 2001:space odyssey...
As a division of Sophos, the existing ActiveState team is committed to continuing its support of the open source language community.
You do realize that every press release during every purchase and merger over the years has *always* said that no changes will be made, no employees will be fired...
May we never see th
... When is Sophos going to stop sending out bounce notices to the forged "senders" of email viruses? These do nothing but spamvertise the product. I must have blocked millions of sophos bounces of Sobig. Not that Sophos is the only offender, but it seems designed to do so...
.doc file. And in every case it's forged. Bounces have to stop.
Fact is, more than 99% of virus traffic is "stealthy" sends of trojans now, not some macro virus attached to a
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Then they bring in the consultants.
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).