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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."

1 of 89 comments (clear)

  1. Re:i luv these guys, but they are doomed by Nurgled · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Indeed. I (through my company) have licences for a bunch of their Perl tools for Windows because at work I have to use a Windows machine. Having Windows around is good when it comes to ensuring code is portable, anyway. There are certain CPAN modules which do not currently build on Windows which one must avoid if attempting to cross-platform Perl apps.

    I can understand why some would use Cygwin but I personally gave up on Cygwin for all uses a few years back since I was constantly running into issues with multiple applications installing their own copies of the cygwin DLL and it getting all confused, not to mention the fact that Cygwin stuff always starts up so slowly. Instead, I use native ports of most of the "standard" GNU command line utilities, ActivePerl and a bunch of other all-native bits and pieces to make my usage of Windows less of a pain in the rear.

    Note also that ActiveState has a tool for packaging up perl applications into Windows executables. It's a total hack revolving around a self-extracting archive but it's transparent enough to the end user that at my office we have several little home-grown tools written in Perl but most users don't even have Perl installed let alone know or care that they're written in Perl.