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ActiveState Returns to Open Source Roots
constab writes "ActiveState, the Sophos-owned company that makes free distributions and commercial programming tools for programming languages like Perl, Python, PHP, Tcl and Ruby, has been sold to a Canadian VC firm. According to the article, ActiveState will go back to its open-source roots and continue development of ActivePerl, ActivePython and ActiveTcl. A full set of Mac OS X on Intel downloads is also in the works."
Pender Financial Group (formerly Devon Ventures Corporation) is a merchant bank that invests in emerging growth companies, specifically those in the technology and health care fields. Subsidiary PenderFund Capital Management Ltd. manages the Pender Growth Fund, a venture capital fund that invests in tech companies located in the Canadian province of British Columbia. Pender Financial owns about $30 million in assets under management. Invested companies include high technology light manufacturer Carmanah, aerial mapping and surveying provider Intermap Technologies Corporation, web hoster Radiant Communications, and messaging software designer Voice Mobility.
If we don't fight for ourselves no one will.
This sounds great. Hopefully they will open up, at least make free(beer), some of their more advanced tools. The Perl dev tools are really good. Only time will tell.
It's great that businesses (and organizations alike) can harness the brainpower of brilliant hobbyists to improve their product for free simply by going open source. I cannot think of any industry in which anything like this is so.
It would be interesting to know how much it was sold for, and how much Sophos valued the anti-virus technology.
$23 million is not really a huge number in the scheme of things, but not the kind of money that a company the size of Sophos would throw away lightly!
Keep dreaming. =\
Do they mean OS X on Intel Macs, or working on cracking a generic version of OS X86 to run on beige boxes (illegal)? The article isn't too clear.
ActiveState have put a Q&A on their website. It has lots of pretty good info, with a little bit of PR thrown in for good measure.
Open Source Root?
It might be a slightly misleading statement, but they have historically done a lot of work _around_ OSS (just not so much _in_).
If you have to be 21 to buy beer, then do you have to be root 21 (that is, 4 years 7 months) to buy root beer?
Let's just hope part of this "back to the roots" thing they FINALLY improve ActivePerl so it can _finally_ install XS compiled modules from CPAN.
It the CamelPack guy that won the "vertical metre of beer" challenge can enhance ActivePerl to do it in only 2 days, why has it taken ActiveState so long?
Wow - that's harsh, mods... Very harsh.
"We'll go back to our roots by continuing what we currently do." - Huh?
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
They are talking about ports of ActiveState's perl/php/python/tcl/ruby on intel OS X.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
This is a polite way of saying sophos got what it needed (puremessage) and is dumping them
everyone use Active(perl,python) raise your hand. i don't see many hands. i like activestate, their hearts are totally in the right place, but they have been eclipsed (pun totally intended) by free tools and decent windows ports from the default code branches. they gave it a good go, some quality code and good tools, but their tools never reached the penetration that would create a self-sustaining market.
This is the highest drinking age in the world
Exception for places where drinking is prohibited altogether (like lots of Muslim countries?)
Maybe I am missing something, but OS X already comes with perl, python, php, ruby, and tclsh. To what end is ActiveState porting their packaging of such things to OS X?
Is this just for compatibility purposes, for software already written to target ActiveState's packages?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
ActiveState is now completely irrelevant. Sophos bought them, slurped up the useful bits to them (now used in their PureMessage product) and then got rid of them. Sophos are not a developer tools company, they are a anti-whatever-threat-you care-to-mention company. Word has it that the two companies didn't get on well when they were in the same boat anyway. If ActiveState were making any (decent) money Sophos would have kept it. Buy a winner, sell a loser.
I believe federal highway funds were withheld from states that did not raise the legal drinking age to 21. Eventually, everyone caved.
From the first Google for "legal drinking age": [snip]
I have been using ActivePerl for 5 years now, and ActivePython for 1.5. Komodo is a great IDE, but what makes ActiveState great is basically just the fact that they are ActiveState.
In a corporate environment, using software from an actual company makes managers and IT folk feel warm and fuzzy. And yes, I realize that ActiveState is just mostly just nicely packaging up available open source software... but I don't tell anyone that. Corporate types tend to like it when they can buy something from someone, or at least point to a (stable) company that sells the product. Saying I'm using ActivePython goes over much better than saying I downloaded something from community-based python.org. And no, I'm not saying any of this makes sense, but it has been my experience for the past five years.
If it weren't for ActiveState, I would be forced to write in VC++ or VBA. Thanks to them, I'm using perl and python for my job every day. And that is pretty awesome.
So, keep up the good work, ActiveState!
The dev tools are fine. Eclipse can debug perl and even javascript seamlessly - allowing you to watch variables, stop on a given line, etc. with an embedded webserver and webbrowser. What isn't is the ActivePerl repository. Its almost entirely built by scripts, and the scripts are easily tripped up.
Hopefully, they'll put a bit of effort into actually converting CPAN packages to ActivePerl so that ActivePerl enjoys a more complete collection of packages. Its not just the little, barely used packages that are missing. For example, Template-Toolkit isn't on ActivePerl. Maybe they could get packages from others who are currently maintaining ActivePerl repositories of tons of missing packages.
Then maybe I can stop maintaining my virtual *nix workstation at work just to create ActivePerl packages.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Agreed. In my previous job, we used ActivePerl extensively, in standalone scripts and on NT/2000 with IIS. In my current job, we use it even more internally (mrtg, various scripts, web apps). The ease of adding packages and the seamless integration in IIS makes it a very valuable tool (since we will continue to run on windows for the foreseable future and have tons of code in VBScript (*sigh*), the last part is especially important).
De gustibus et coloribus non est disputandum
Agreed...
It would be nice of they'd open source their Perl.Net implementation, for example.
Throw the bums out!
What the hell? You don't need to improve ActivePerl at all. You just need to improve the rest of your system, by installing a suitable C compiler. Okay, yeah, it might be slightly nice if ActiveState were to provide a compatible environment for download side-by-side, but I certainly don't think it needs to be default. PPM is more in line with what "windows people" expect anyway :)
The comment is ambigious. The only thing that makes sense to me in terms of what they might mean is that they are going to modify Visual Perl/Python/Ruby (active state products which are modified versions of Perl, Python and Ruby that run as part os Visual Studio) so that it can compile OSX executibles. That isn't much work and would be OSX on Intel specific so it makes sense. I don't have any inside information so YMMV and should.
In a corporate environment, using software from an actual company makes managers and IT folk feel warm and fuzzy.
/me shrugs
Second this *ten times over*.
I've been suggesting perl for producing test harnesses for ages (writing them in C is just a waste of time), but the folks running things just don't *trust* perl. Until someone discovered ActiveState. I walked in one day and found them using the commercial Komodo, happy as a clam, and talking about how great perl was.
Confused the hell out of me.
The only thing I can guess is that if you have business roots, you're always trying to figure out the other guy's angle. Why is he doing something for you? What's he planning to get? If business folks can figure this out, and decide that it's aligned with their own interests, then they feel okay accepting the deal.
Open source software just doesn't make any sense in a model that only recognizes human time and direct monetary value. So you get people who *never* have worked with hobbyists who like producing free stuff. They've never worked in an environment in which the marginal cost of production and distribution can approximate zero. It's very reasonable for them to look very dubiously at software, thinking "I can't figure out how this guy is going to profit from this, so I'd better stay the hell away, since he might try some sort of horrific extortion down the line. Who the hell would write software for *fun*? I have to yell at people to get them in on time to meet our deadlines!"
On the other hand, doing a deal in which the other guy is clearly making a profit means that they don't need to imagine ways in which they can get stabbed in the back later. They can be comfortable believing that the other guy is simply happy making the deal.
It's a weird mentality from a hobbyist standpoint, but it's the only way I can explain why so many companies look at Debian and walk away quickly but are happy as a clam buying Red Hat Enterprise Edition.
As long as I get to use something at work that I can freely use myself the rest of the time, I'm all for it.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
So they made ActivePerl etc. By their naming convention can we thank them for ActivX/Joke?
ActivePerl installs XS modules from CPAN just fine if you have a suitable compiler installed on your system; Microsoft Visual C++ or gcc (MinGW). ActivePerl will automatically reconfigure itself to match the compiler found.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,69946-0.htm l
Lego brought in top level hobbyists to develop the new Mindstorms NXT kit. Brilliant move IMO.
ActiveTcl?
I've been using ActivePerl these past two weeks - not that I haven't before. The install is so quick, it's forgettable. Never have had any problems using ActivePerl. Yes, I am glad there is a co. that stands behind it. Perl is awesome, but if left to the whim of fate on Windows, I fear the angry mob of Python, Ruby, whatever is new and thinking it's better than everything before it type thinking. I am glad that Perl proves itself worthy.