Ranga Nathan wrote:
> I have not been following the news. What really happened here?
I haven't really been following what's been going on with ActiveState
either for the last several years. As they've shifted their focus to
PHP, Python, and Ruby, and away from Perl, I've lost interest in what
they've been up to.
I do know that 3 or 4 years ago they were acquired by Sophos, an
anti-spam tool company. The relevance of ActiveState to Sophos' product
line probably diminished over time, and it no longer made sense for them
to be joined.
> I thought Microsoft was 'actively' supporting Activestate!
I don't know, but I'd guess that Microsoft's stake in ActiveState was
probably bought out by Sophos. As Perl and these other scripting
languages became less relevant to Microsoft, who is now busy pushing C#
and .NET, they probably lost interest in ActiveState.
> That seems to be a low valuation for such a good company.
Not really. They're a tool vendor for languages that are either facing a
shrinking user base (Perl and I'd guess TCL) or growing, but very small
user base (Python, Ruby). I'd guess their largest user base is PHP
developers these days, though I don't think ActiveState is to PHP (or
any of these other languages) what they once were to Perl. At one time
you wouldn't think of using Perl on Windows without using the
ActiveState version. Even if they didn't make much money directly from
the language distribution itself, it created a community that was more
open to using ActiveState development tools. My guess is that they're
now just one of many IDE choices for developers of these newer languages.
I'd be curious to know how they compare to Zend, who similarly supports
an open source scripting language (PHP), but I think Zend is far more
central to PHP, much like ActiveState was to Perl years ago.
-Tom
--
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/
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