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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.
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.
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?
"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
Sorry, no current plans to open source Komodo at this time.
David Ascher, ActiveState
I would say that most perl users on the Windows platform are still very much using ActiveState.
- oZ
// i am here.
I used to use cygwin heavily (not just for perl), but with recent versions, it has gotten very very slow. For many of my scripts, ActivePerl is more than 100% faster than cygwin.
Another thing is that cygwin has a number of bugs when working with sockets (e.g. select() uses 100% CPU).
LL
>> everyone use Active(perl,python) raise your hand. i don't see many hands.
Sure you would. If you wait for others to respond. I have been using ActivePython for over 4 years now. They should have a fine service model. Large corporations would be glad to license support if they develop software over these tools. And unlike JBoss, ActiveState does not need to develop to the same extent. They spend less money, may make make money only proportional to that. But to dismiss that is too early. Dynamic Languages are only begining to get accepted into the enterprise. They should be prepared well by the time the market is ripe.
Apparently that is not going to happen, according to an ActiveState employee post on Slashdot.
ZERO ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ONE! Just brushing up for my next big invention: Ethernet over Voice (EoV)
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.
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!
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.