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ActiveState Returns to Open Source Roots

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the if-you-get-lost-return-to-the-beginning dept.

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."

3 of 89 comments (clear)

  1. Good news by cerelib · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  2. Re:i luv these guys, but they are doomed by outZider · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I would say that most perl users on the Windows platform are still very much using ActiveState.

    --
    - oZ
    // i am here.
  3. Good for corporate lackeys by AWG · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!