Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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.

  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. Anti-Virus for Linux/Unix by hbo · · Score: 3, Interesting


    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

  6. What Does it All Mean?? by kurosawdust · · Score: 3, Funny
    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?"

    It means they will be able to consolidate their debt and significantly lower their monthly payments, of course...

  7. Re:What will this mean... by 0x0d0a · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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